Long Journey to a $435M Exit: Bytemobile Cofounders Chris Koopmans and Nicholas Stavrakos (Part 1)

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Chris Koopmans is a cofounder and the COO of Bytemobile. He has more than 13 years of industry experience in hardware and software engineering and architecture. He has eight issued and pending patents covering wireless internet protocol (IP) services and optimization technology. Before joining Bytemobile, he worked as an engineer at Intel Corporation’s Microcomputer Research Laboratories and Silicon Graphics’ Cray Research subsidiary. Koopmans earned a B.S. in electrical and computer engineering with highest honors from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Nicholas Stavrakos is a cofounder and the vice president and chief architect of Bytemobile. He has contributed patents for a method and system for object predication as and a method and system for delta compression. He completed his bachelors and masters degrees in electrical engineering and computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as well as the majority of his doctoral work before leaving to found Bytemobile.

Sramana: Chris and Nicholas, let’s start at the beginning of each of your stories. Where did you grow up, and what are the roots of your entrepreneurial careers?

Chris Koopmans: My family was a military family, so I moved all over the world. I graduated from high school in Illinois and went to one of the best engineering colleges in the country, the University of Illinois. That is where we started Bytemobile. It was created on the fourth floor of the science lab with a couple of professors and their PhD students. Nicholas and I were the students.

Nicholas Stavrakos: I am originally from the southern suburbs of Chicago. I grew up there and did my undergraduate studies and my masters before heading off to do my PhD. I was almost finished with my PhD when we started the company. I had always intended to return and finish it, but I guess I was having too much fun with the company.

Sramana: Did your PhD research turn into Bytemobile?

Chris Koopmans: Sort of. There were two professors and six PhD students who started the company. One professor was doing research in wireless, while the other was doing research in high-performance computing. At a high level we brought those two aspects together, but we did not directly take what we did there and turn it into Bytemobile. The relationships and the experience transferred into Btyemobile. We did not take any of the technology from the university to start the company.

Sramana: What year did you start the company?

Nicholas Stavrakos: We started the company in 2000.

Sramana: What did you see when you looked around that compelled you to make the leap and start a company? Obviously the dot-com crash was going on in those years.

Chris Koopmans: The market was not quite crashing yet. We formed the concept of the company in late 1999. We got angel funding and started in the spring of 2000. We saw a lot of things happening in the world of technology. At that point everybody who was anybody was starting a company and bringing that technology to the market. We wanted to be a part of that. We felt that something big in the world was happening.

About a year later, a lot of that came apart. Regardless, it felt like something that we should be doing. The founding principle of Bytemobile was that cellular technology was emerging. In Europe basic data services were starting. We saw 3G spectrum being auctioned in Europe. We heard talk of tablets and smartphones. We believed that in a short time we would see a global high-speed network where mobile devices could consume content. We felt the mobile Internet would become the next big thing. As it turns out all of that happened. It did take nine years for that to transpire instead of just a year, but it happened.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Long Journey to a $435M Exit: Bytemobile Cofounders Chris Koopmans and Nicholas Stavrakos
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