Having Fun At The Cusp Of Technology And Entertainment: Phunware CEO Alan Knitowski (Part 1)

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Alan Knitowski is the chairman and CEO of Phunware, which develops the mobile experience framework brandME and the mobile application infrastructure PRAISE. He is a serial entrepreneur and a veteran of the United States Army. Prior to Phunware he was the president of alternative investments for Curo Capital LLC and managing director and president of strategic investments for Trymetris Capital Management.

Sramana: Alan, let’s start with your personal background.

Alan Knitowski: I am a non-recovering serial entrepreneur. I spent 12 years in California, which included five in Silicon Valley and seven in Newport Beach. For the past three years I have been in Austin, Texas. Prior to that I was a military officer and served both domestically and abroad. I was recruited out of the military to work at Northern Telecom in 1996. From that point onward I have worked in tech. I saw the huge explosion of the technology sector and the Internet sector. Obviously, fast forward another 10 years, and we see the explosion of mobile.

Even though I told myself over and over again that I would continue to do some investing, serve on some boards, and buy some companies, the serial entrepreneur bug got the best of me. My business partner and I decided we wanted to dive back in because there were 4 billion feature phones that were going to be swapped out for smart phones. That felt a lot like the migration from circuit switching to packet switching to us, and the adoption of Voice over IP.

Sramana: Before we delve into the story of Phunware, what kinds of startups were you working with?

Alan Knitowski: I have been blessed and fortunate to have a good business partner. We have built and sold several companies so far. The first company that we built was called Vovida Networks, which was a class 5 switch that we built and sold to Cisco Systems. Thereafter on that deal, I worked to bring VoIP and other switching fabric into Cisco, which was diving into the world of telephony and communication.

The second company we got involved with was Telverse Communications. We built that company, and it was acquired by Level 3 Communications. When they unregulated communications ASP to we brought it to an IP-centric functionality. After that we did vCIS, which was an anti-virus security software company that was sold to Internet Security Systems, which was eventually purchased by IBM. I have done a lot of communications, networking, infrastructure, telephony, and a little bit of software. All of that has come into play for Phunware.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Having Fun At The Cusp Of Technology And Entertainment: Phunware CEO Alan Knitowski
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