An Emerging Success Story from Indiana: Fathom Voice CEO Cameron Weeks (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like around 2008, two relatively young entrepreneurs from Indiana sold the company for upwards of a couple of a million dollars and were starting another company.

Cameron Weeks: We founded this company that we operate today back in 2007 as a side project. Someone who we had worked with in the past actually owned a high rise building downtown in Indianapolis. He called and said that he was redoing the eighth floor and needed a phone system and if we could help buy a phone system for him. We were already at Purdue at that time. The story was we said, “We won’t buy you a phone system. We’ll just build one. Give us two weeks and we’ll have it done for you. We’ll come set it up.”

We retreated to my parent’s house. I was a freshman at college. We built this phone system. It was an utter disaster. The entire eighth floor is full of one to two person law firms. These are not huge firms. I quickly learned that attorneys, when their phones don’t work, are very mean people. They yell at you and make you feel like you’re going to go completely out of business and end up in jail somehow. They were very aggressive that they were going to have their phones work one way or another. We dived into this thing. We wanted to turn it into a real company.

I was 19. The world doesn’t need another phone provider but it does need a new way of speaking about the phone. How can you turn the phone into a piece of software that people can actually interact with and actually pull value out of rather than just a simple part of taking audio and throwing it over a cable and delivering it somewhere else. That’s fine, but how can we analyze both people on the call? How can we make recommendations of what people should say on how to better engage with people? That’s how we built the would be Fathom.

Sramana Mitra: This is in 2008?

Cameron Weeks: Yes, that’s when it got started.

Sramana Mitra: This first customer came to you in 2008?

Cameron Weeks: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: It took you two weeks to build the solution and deliver it to him.

Cameron Weeks: Yes, it took two weeks to build the first version of our phone system. After 10 years of engineering now, we have a much better platform. In the first one we did nothing apart from building the solution.

Sramana Mitra: Whom did you compete with? It’s not true that there aren’t phone systems in the market. Obviously, you were competing with other people. Who are your top competitors? What was the case for doing a new company in that space?

Cameron Weeks: We had worked in the past with the building owner who owned this high rise. We convinced him not to go buy a phone system and to just let us build him one. Looking back at it for what we charged, he got a hell of a deal. The idea is it was just really two silly student engineers. There was no idea to build a full company that first day. There was no long-term strategy. It was just that we know how to write software, phones can’t be that hard, why don’t we write a piece of software for phones. It later evolved into a whole company and a whole idea. Quite honestly, there was no initial plan for a company. It was just something we could do.

This segment is part 2 in the series : An Emerging Success Story from Indiana: Fathom Voice CEO Cameron Weeks
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