Bootstrapping An Innovative Telecom Services Startup: Callture Co-founders Mamoon Rashid and Siva Sanmuga (Part 1)

Mamoon Rashid and Siva Sanmuga are serial entrepreneurs who co-founded Telcan in 1997 followed by Callture in 2004. Both graduated from the University of Waterloo, Ontario, after completing their engineering studies. Callture is a Canadian technology company based in Ontario and is a subsidiary of Telcan.

Sramana: Mamoon, can you give us some context to begin your story?

Mamoon Rashid: About 13 years ago, Siva Sanmuga, Anton Mendoza and I were in our final year of engineering studies at the University of Waterloo. We had an idea about how to deliver international callback services. At that time it was very expensive to make telephone calls directly from developing countries to North America or Europe. The service was a reverse calling service where the person initiating the call would technically receive the call.

At that time we did some research to see if we could find a system that would allow us to conduct calls in that manner. We were students with a lot of loans, so we did not have the funding to purchase $2 million of telecom equipment. We decided to create our own telecommunications switch. At that time it was a PC based system that we physically placed in Anton’s basement. We ran that for a few months before we were able to put it in a proper collocation site in New York, which was a big milestone for us. We did that in 1997. At that time we had very few customers, mostly international. Our customers were primarily from Latin America or the Middle East.

Sramana: What was the business idea? Were you focused on businesses or consumers?

Mamoon Rashid: It originally started with businesses, but we had consumer products. There were businesses that were trying to get international exposure. It was very expensive for those businesses to make international phone calls. This was a way for them to reduce their long distance chargers. In 1997, we had Volvo, BP Mobil, and a portion of the U.S. Immigration using our services. It was a product that could be used for consumers and businesses.

Sramana: You just named some very large companies. Why were they using your product?

Mamoon Rashid: At that time, making a call from Cuba to New York, you would pay $6 a minute. They used us just to gain access to the significant discounts. In the early 2000s we developed another product called the virtual PBX. It is a very common service in the industry today. That product was similar to cloud computing because it was designed for small businesses that were international. There were a lot of customers in Europe and Australia who wanted to tap into the U.S. market. We were the best possible way for them to offer a toll-free services to the U.S. market.

We had created the entire platform on the legacy TDM phone system. We spent a good amount of time migrating that to VoIP and modern technologies. We have made that product accessible and integrated it with cloud computing. We have integration with Skype, Salesforce.com, and with eFax functionalities as well. That product has its genesis in our very first concept in 1996.

Sramana: Are your original products still part of your current offering?

Mamoon Rashid: We still offer them. We have positioned our business in a way were we have created two separate divisions. One division deals with those types of customers. At the same time we have another business unit that primarily targets small businesses on the virtual PBX front. Some of the products we have are very similar to Ring Central or Grasshopper.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Bootstrapping An Innovative Telecom Services Startup: Callture Co-founders Mamoon Rashid and Siva Sanmuga
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