Milestone Group Quarterly: April 2008
Articles
Face to Face:
Ted Griggs, CEO of Ribbit
Milestone: You're calling Ribbit "Silicon Valley's first phone company." Can you tell us what that means?
Griggs: Sure, a lot of people ask us if the world needs another phone company. And we say that the world needs a different kind of company, one that thinks in Silicon Valley terms.
When we started Ribbit, we stood back and asked:
"If you were going to make a new phone company today, what would it look like?"
It wouldn't look like existing phone companies, that's for sure. We looked at mobile phone use, how phones and computers are coming together, and we looked at alternative voice networks like Skype. Since Ribbit's founders all have telco and switch experience, it was easy for us to see that there was an opportunity to bring some of these things together in an interesting new way.
We had access to some legacy technology that we had created in another company, so we set out to adopt it to build a new type of multi-protocol soft switch that lets us make, take and manage voice across various networks -- including mobile phones.
Again, thinking like a Silicon Valley company, so we opened the switch up to the web development community using Flex and Flash based APIs.
If you were to invent a phone company today, you would probably look at Google and Yahoo as the model. If you're building maps, you don't just build a service that lets you map directions; you build an API that a developer can use in applications and to create a better experience for users. That's what the phone companies don't do.
Thinking in terms of the developer's needs is tough for the phone companies. They don't think in terms of components and opening the network is a scary thing to them.
At the same time, we talk to carriers about bringing them an open ecosystem for developers and how that can shield them from needing to rip open their infrastructure to accommodate the developer community.
They're starting to see us as an interesting partner because with Ribbit, they can deliver certain services to their customers that they can't necessarily provide on their own.
Partnering with them can be a win/win because if a phone company has five million customers, then the developers have a bigger community, and that would attract more developers, which means more applications that, in turn, attract more users.
Milestone: Can you tell us more about how you got started?
Griggs: Crick Waters, one of the other founders, and I spent about nine months talking to the industry and customers (of all types). We came up with two key insights. First, the business line is on PBX, which was becoming antiquated because of cell phone use. Cell phones were being used more and more for business (unless you are a Fortune 100 company using Avaya or Cisco Systems to create fixed mobile convergence), leading to two different silos of communication. Second, people told us that they use Skype to make calls or Yahoo messenger to talk to their sales team or customers, not just for text but also for voice. That meant three communications silos – the business line, the mobile line and new voice over IM infrastructures.
Generally when people talked about Voice 2.0 (meaning computers, voice and the Web), people viewed services like JaJah, and Skype as a way to reduce to zero the cost of calling. While that might be interesting to us as consumers, it's not that interesting for business because you are driving value down to zero. It's also, as it turns out, not that interesting to most business customers, as cost isn't the big thing; it's actually the productivity gain and the value in that productivity gain.
Milestone: Is this where your big idea came together?
Griggs: As we talked to these different companies and industries, we heard that they were using software that they wanted to integrate voice into these applications, even though a lot of these systems were disparate (depending upon the vertical).
That's when we realized that, as Ribbit, we would never be able to write software for all these verticals but we could enable voice in these applications, adding value for application developers. This is how we came to see this as a platform opportunity and why we created the API.
The other interesting thing we found is that more and more services are Web-based (browser, SaaS, on demand, etc.). It became clear that we could actually put voice into the hands of developers building these Web-based services.
Milestone: What's the value innovation with Ribbit?
Griggs: Ribbit has several value components. We have the SmartSwitch technology, and we have our developer community; but we've also created two high value applications that we think of as reference apps; one for the enterprise -- Ribbit for Salesforce. And another for the consumer – code-named Ribbit Amphibian.
We've recently started talking about a Flash Toolkit that lets non-programmers create Web telephony integrations without having to write a lot of code. It opens up our platform to a whole new world of non-programmer types and accelerates innovation.
We expect innovation to happen so fast that it will redefine what telephony is. Right now, we have about four thousand developers and we want to get this to 30 thousand. Developers simply go to the Web site and join the developer program. We give them a phone number and a place on the Web site where they can build their project.
We've also introduced the Ribbit Store, where they can make money by selling their "voiceware" applications. We've set up a revenue share model, where we'll run the store and handle the tracking and billing so that they can focus on their app creation.
Milestone: Amphibian is consumer based; what portion of developers are focusing on consumer vs. enterprise business?
Griggs: We are already surprised by how developers are using the Ribbit platform. Yes, some people are building consumer applications with Amphibian. And some are building enterprise applications, but we've also had people create custom call center solutions with no help from us. These things just turn up in our in-box or we find them through someone's blog. We've also been approached by a range of partners, from handset makers, to distributors, to advertisers -- who are exploring Ribbit for a variety of interesting uses.
Ribbit for Salesforce was actually built by a non-telephony developer as well. It's our best example of what happens when you put voice into the workflow of a high value application. Essentially, Ribbit sees voice as a "data object" and once it's a data object, all kinds of interesting things begin to happen around voice automation. Other developers can take everything they see in Ribbit for Salesforce or Amphibian and bring it into their own area of expertise. We're very excited to see what happens when people bring rich voice integrations to other verticals. Voice can start to drive all kinds of productivity gains within the organization.
Milestone: What are the social networking applications for the technology?
Griggs: We have seen a couple of developers use Ribbit to build plug-ins that essentially create a virtual version of your mobile phone sitting inside any Web page. Within that, there are modes on the phone that you can have someone call you.
Taking this technology and adapting it into different communities is what the developers are doing. For instance, using Ribbit, a cell phone essentially rings inside a Facebook page. You can answer, call back, check your cell phone messages, even manage your address book from inside the communities you already use.
And Amphibian has social networking characteristics of its own. When a mobile call comes in, Amphibian actually does a dip and translates the caller's number into an e-mail address and name. We then pull content from the social web associated with that person's identity and have it populate the Web page. This lets you see what the caller has been up to and can add to the conversation. We expect to see interesting innovation here because voice is naturally viral. We have also just started looking at delivering your personal call information visually – to present you with a new version of your social grid. Think of it as the "vocal grid".
We are already seeing interesting content combinations and since this is all about the phone and the computer coming together, we expect to see some pretty compelling mash-ups from our developers.
Milestone: What do you think is going to happen to the landline in the next 15 years?
Griggs: I have to believe that the landline will go away; I don't see what evidence there is to save it. Wireless goes everywhere; you take your number wherever you go. That's your identity. That is what Amphibian is about -- bringing your wireless and your computer together.
Generally, we have found that people believe their mobile number is their number. It makes everything work around what people seem to be adopting. Even on the text side, you see different services that aggregate a bunch of different things. People just want to communicate; they don't care all about the silos.
Milestone: As the cellular industry has tried to find more and more traction on the data networks, everything keeps coming back to the killer application, voice. Why is that?
Griggs: It's the reason we picked Salesforce as our sample business application. They had loads of interesting data that could be tracked, but voice and voicemail were missing. Then it turns out, salespeople generally don't like CRM systems. It's the sales manager or the VP that likes it (because they can see what's going on). Voice beings a very convenient way for salespeople to interact with CRM.
For example, Ribbit lets you call in meeting notes. Ribbit transcribes your voice message and enter it into the your Salesforce. This saves the salesperson hours of typing. The last thing a salesperson wants to do is sit in front of a computer and type in meeting notes. Ribbit also takes mobile voice messages from customers and transcribes and delivers them into Salesforce as well.
That is a killer feature within CRM, salespeople like to communicate with voice. It unstraps them from a system that normally would have kept them tied down. We've actually done a really powerful thing here that users are quickly adopting.
Milestone: If you could impart one lesson to technology executives what would you want to pass on?
Griggs: What I have learned is that the best technologies don't always win. It's the stuff around the technology that makes the business. Technology is one thing, but making sure that you have a strong business is the difference. In telecom, at the end of the day, it doesn't really change the way things are done. It's a call that happens to go over a packetized pipe vs. a TDM pipe. It's the applications. To get the applications out there, you do need the rest of the stuff around the technology, particularly strong marketing.
Milestone: Can you think of a great technology that just failed because they didn't wrap those things around the technology?
Griggs: There was a company called Interval, a really neat idea. It was to take the smartest people out of academia and industry, to essentially create a think tank. They were given 10 years to take a piece of technology they are very interested in and turn it into something that could be sold. Seven years in, the company was wrapped down. Even though the number of ideas that came out of the shop was stunning, they were all without any end game. Even somebody with the experience of Paul Allen, who built the OS, understood applications, understood the whole picture. It really takes more than just good technology to win the race.
Ted Griggs is co-founder and CEO of Ribbit. Ted founded and launched six telecommunication technology companies over the past 17 years to become a leader in the telecommunications industry.
Mr. Griggs is also founder and a board member of Digital Deck, Inc. Most recently, he was Chairman of Syndeo Corporation, which he founded and for which he served as CEO from 1999 through 2003. Under Mr. Griggs leadership, Syndeo grew into a leading softswitch provider to major MSOs, with over 40 customers in the U.S. and Japan.
Prior to Syndeo, he was founder and President of Junction, Inc., a company developing a next-generation telecommunications open switch that combined TDM and voice packet infrastructure. Cisco Systems, Inc. purchased Junction in 1998. Before creating Junction, Mr. Griggs was co-founder of The Renaissance Group, Inc., a builder of flexible enhanced services platforms. Mr. Griggs sold Renaissance to Precision Systems, Inc. and became chief technology officer for the publicly-traded company.
Mr. Griggs was also co-founder of the Internet Gaming Zone, a company bought by Microsoft which has become the cornerstone of Microsoft's online gaming strategy. Mr. Griggs holds a degree in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley.
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