PBX as SaaS: RingCentral CEO Vlad Shmunis (Part 2)

SM: Tell me about your first job at Corporate Data Science.

VS: It was in the very early days before Windows and before DOS, back in 1981. I was a Unix systems engineer. They were trying to come up with an Operating System.

SM: Would it be accurate to say you did a bunch of programming jobs early on?

VS: I graduated with a technical degree and initially I started out as an engineer. I went back to school, taught a little bit, and then went back out in the job market. Fairly early on it was fairly clear there were better programmers than me, but it was reasonably clear I was good with people. I was also good at organizing things and I was good at managing projects so I gravitated to management roles. My last honest job before I started my own company was as a Software Director.

I went to Berkley for an MBA because I wanted to get more professional in my management. Half way through I decided that enough was enough and I needed to just do my own company. I was 30 and I felt that was really old!

SM: What drove your desire to have your own company?

VS: To be completely honest it was the desire to not work for someone else.

SM: That is a very common theme!

VS: It is like immigration. You don’t go to America, you leave Russia. That was my main motivation.

SM: What year was this?

VS: It was 1991.

SM: What was the process you went through to decide what project you wanted to take on which would allow you to work for yourself?

VS: I did not have that much choice and I was not sure there was that much of a process. I was progressing career wise. I had 40 people under me and I was 29. Now I look back and I swear to God I was going through a mid life crisis. Nothing was making sense, and everything seemed like a complete waste of time.

The big ah ha to me was when I realized I had to take a step back. The technical management thing was not necessarily going anywhere and I was going to become a drone. I demoted myself three levels and decided to go back to technology. I decided to roll up my sleeves and start programming again. Initially the way the company started was to start getting contracts. It was a consulting type situation.

SM: That is another very common theme; entrepreneurs start companies after consulting for other people all the time!

VS: In my particular case it was a funny situation. Windows 3.0 was coming out and it was a big thing in the industry. Nobody knew it, including myself. Somehow I got myself into this contract where this team wanted to be brought up on Windows and they needed someone to teach them.

I owned a book on Windows. I figured I could read a chapter in the book and then give a lecture the next day. That is how it got started. I started hiring people eventually and we got known as Windows experts. For whatever reason I always liked system level projects versus pure applications. I never did a banking system. I enjoyed developing ways to interface the computer with a device. I was at the right place at the right time. A lot of new technologies were coming out and being integrated into the Windows environment.

There were two which were really hot at the time. One had to do with digital video which we now take for granted. To even show a video of anything on a computer screen was a wow. Hardware companies were providing chipsets which could be used in the playback of video.

The second hot issue was communications. I started hiring engineers and for the longest time we only had engineers. The closest person that was not an engineer was me. We just started getting these pieces of technology assembled where we could help hardware manufacturers interface their products into Windows.

This segment is part 2 in the series : PBX as SaaS: RingCentral CEO Vlad Shmunis
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