An Emerging Success Story from Indiana: Fathom Voice CEO Cameron Weeks (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: It was kind of off-the-cuff basically.

Cameron Weeks: Yes. As we were running the web company, we were doing that.

Sramana Mitra: By the end of 2008, you had sold the web company, right?

Cameron Weeks: Yes, it was closer to 2009.

Sramana Mitra: What happened in 2009? What did you do next?

Cameron Weeks: The next thing we did was we decided to focus on the telephony thing. It had been sitting there making money from day one. People pay their phone bill every month. By that time, we actually worked the kinks out of it. It was reliable and it worked every time.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of a phone system were you selling? You were selling a hardware phone system or a hosted system? What are we talking about?

Cameron Weeks: It was our phone system. We wrote all the source code for it. It lived in a data center that we had for the web stuff.

Sramana Mitra: It was an online hosted PBX? Is that what you were talking about?

Cameron Weeks: Yes. Especially in 2007, Ring Central was there. We got out of the web hosting business and focused on the telcom part of it. We saw a unique opportunity to work with the CEO of RCA. Depending on how much you know about the brand RCA, they used to be a huge electronics company and manufactured lots of stuff. Over the years, the company pretty much died but the brand still holds value. The brand is actually the most valuable component of the company and thus, they licensed each other’s companies. In 2010, there is not an IP phone in the RCA phone lineup. At this point in time, RCA owned something like 43% of all office equipment.

RCA decides that they want to build an IP phone but in hardware, margins are always diminishing. They were trying to find a way on how they can make more money on this. We convinced a guy named Dwight to come from Seattle to Indiana to look at what we were building. In 2010, that was still a fairly new idea. We got Dwight to come. Within a couple of hours of conversation, they immediately signed a letter of intent for a few million dollars worth of stuff. At this point in time, there was no large team of people behind us that was going to help us build all of this and fill this order. Dwight’s team that he brought with him to evaluate with us are no dummies. They catch on that it’s just me and my co-founder. They were still on-board with the deal, but they write into the contract that we have to raise some money, build a team, and we have to do it in two months. If we keep doing the math right, I’m 20 years old now who grew up in a very small farm town. I had never heard the word venture capital. I had no idea where I would raise money from. We go out and raised $500,000.

This segment is part 3 in the series : An Emerging Success Story from Indiana: Fathom Voice CEO Cameron Weeks
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