Craig Earnshaw

I have seen thousands upon thousands of pitches where the entrepreneur meets with one or more investors, does usually a PowerPoint like pitch and tries to persuade the investors to put money into the company. Brian is probably one of the most skilled presenters and coolest persons I've ever seen in the hot seat of any presenters. I saw him win with eight grilling, hard-nosed kermagin investors for 2 hours. for two hours in a conference room, be grilled to death. He neverin broke broke into a sweat, never flinched. He answered every question logical. He was so prepared. And that's why those of us in the room afterwards put a lot of money into his company. Yeah. Yeah. Rock next rock. Okay, thank you so much for watching last episode. We're back. We are back. This is episode 13 or 14. Now we're losing track. I don't know what episode it is. Actually, that's really horrible. I actually have it right here in my notes is 14. This is episode 14. And I'm Tyler. This is John. We're your host start of the Startup Ignition podcast. But today we are joined by Brian. And Brian is a special guest because he was just on another podcast, but you're we're lucky enough to have you on this podcaster. Brian of of Alansa. He's the CEO founder of Alansza. And I'm not super familiar with Ali what Alansa does. I had to go to chat GP. I may be a little familiar with it. Yeah, you have a lot familiar with it. Yeah, a lot familiar with it, but you need to correct me if I'm wrong here, but I I have a description. It's Aliana is a leading cloud communications platform that enables service providers. Is that correct? Yep. Okay. Cuz we need to dive into that cuz I'm I'm not super familiar with that what that means or what it is, but I just heard of it from my dad, from passing, from your history, from the education and the mentorship that we do. He brings you and your war stories up all the time. So, so I'm super excited to talk about those today. Let me tee this up for the viewers and listeners. Okay. Brian Butler, CEO, founder of Aliana is perhaps in my I have seen thousands upon thousands of pitches where a pitch for to investors is where the entrepreneur meets with one or more investors, does usually a PowerPoint like pitch and tries to persuade the investors to put money into the company. Brian is probably one of the most skilled presenters and coolest persons I've ever seen in the hot seat of any presenters. No, I here just to flash forward and then we'll talk about more detail. I saw him win with eight grilling hard-nosed kermagin investors in for two hours. True. For two hours in a conference room, be grilled to death. He never broke broke into a sweat. never flinched. Do you remember this? Do I remember it? Yeah, of course. He answered every question, had answers, logical. He was so prepared and that's why those of us in the room afterwards put a lot of money into his company. Yeah. Yeah. Totally successful. Yeah. So, everybody should listen to this if you want to see a CEO that knows how to raise money and be good in the hot seat. Not not only that, we refer a lot of people to Brian just because of the war stories and learnings that he's had. Pay it forward and mentor back. Yeah. No, Brian is a very Yeah. But you're a big quiver arrow in our quiver that we give to a lot of entrepreneurs for just learnings, right? Awesome. Totally. Okay, let me finish this bio on them real quick. That was a great side story because I went back all the way to your college days of Git phone, right? Okay. I I'm not super familiar. I don't know if you remember git phone. Do you remember git phone? 1.0. Is that is that the one with your father? Yeah, that's the that's the original story doing multinational vo for international and before that you guys were in the long distance business. Yeah. But we'll jump into that when we get into your history. But just recently I found out that Utah business published an article of you CEO of the year 2025. Yeah. Congratulations. Thank you. We have CEO of the year on our podcast. Yeah. I mean that when I looked that up I was like dang Brian go Brian. And does he deserve it or what? He does. Yes. So that's huge. That's a huge uh uh feather in your cap too as well. Not just Alansza and the Warers you have, but the success that Aliana is having right now and where you've taken it. That's amazing. Uh outside of that, just a great all-around dude, mentor, advisor, and are you doing investing now? Are you doing some investing? A little bit of investing. I know that that's on the table. Yeah, I still love the primary kind of focus being on Aliana, but I do a little bit where I find kind of an overlap of passion and you're still dayto-day operational. It's been a long run. It's been a long run for Brian, but he has taken chips off the table now, which is exciting. Okay, but I still don't want to jump right into your history. On our podcast, Brian, we always take our guests and we take like 3 to 5 minutes and we do an icebreaker game just to have us fun. So, I'm going to do an icebreaker game with you. We're going to play a quick game of this or that and you're going to tell me which one you prefer. Okay. And these are going to be modern tech solutions and platforms and you tell me which one you prefer over the other. Just quick. What's your snap? And you can participate too. Do you want to participate? We'll both you both will do it. Slack or Discord? Slack. Slack. I like Discord because I'm not a big fan of Slack. Yeah. Okay. I knew you were going to say Discord. Kora or Reddit? Reddit. I like them both, but Reddit has become more better than Kora to me. I agree with that too. Corora, if 10 years ago was Kora, now I think it's Reddit. Notion or Evernote? Do you use either of those? Um, big power Evernote user migrating to Notion right now. Really? Yep. Wow. How about Have you used either one of them? Evernote for more than a decade and I have a paid account. Um, one thing that's annoying, Evernote though, really I think blew it in terms of having to pay extra to have it on two different devices at the same time. That really is that for you too. I think Evernote, if you're listening, that was a huge mistake. You're losing us as users. Let's see if we can influence Evernote from the small startup podcast. Evernote really made it annoying. And also, sometimes Evernote you can't log into. Okay, next one. Zoom or Google Meet? Neither. Neither. No way. What are you using? Teams. Aliana. Like, come on. No. So, we have our own UC client that we use. You do? Yeah. I didn't know that. Really? Yeah. Look. And if I was to use one of the big three, I would say no to both of those. And I would say Teams. Teams. Really? Interesting. Dude, we're a big Microsoft shop now. So, like Okay. You got to you got you'll hear the rest of the story. And for me, between those two, I'm going to tell you 50/50 between those two for me. So, that's because I used to be more Zoom, but Meet is very convenient and um because of, you know, the frequent use. But hey, we got to check yours out now. Yeah, you do. So, throw us over one of those subscriptions, dude. That's good. Um, Stripe or PayPal? Stripe. I agree. Yeah, Stripe because of how it fits in the integrations and dev. But I and I'm going to get in trouble with Stripe because Stripe's amazing. But once you've got Stripe for a year or two in a company, it becomes you can shave and make a little extra money by finding another way to go because Stripe's pretty expensive. But it's easy to start as startup, but it is more expensive than other solutions. Okay, I already know the answer to this one because of your previous answers. We're getting to know you pretty well. AWS or Azure? Both. Really? Yeah. I'm going to like Yeah, I'm going to like switch it on both of these. Like really depends on the application and what we're doing. I mean, look, we have a really long-standing relationship with AWS. Awesome partner. Um, we just bought a company out of Azure for operators. So, and they've become really great partners and a really big part of what we're doing going forward. So, that's cool. Cool. Figma or Adobe XD or just the Adobe suite? Adobe. Adobe. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. GitHub or GitLab. Do you know Are you familiar with Git Git repositories or do any kind of coding stuff? Yes, but I would say defer to my team. Yeah. Defer to your team. Okay. This one's What would What do you say? I want to know because you're the most coder in here probably. GitHub. GitHub. GitHub. Okay. Uh Spotify or Apple Music? Apple Music. I'm Spotify. I'm Spotify, too. That's interesting. Well, the Spotify's got the My wife is Apple Music. I pay both subscriptions. So, the f the family deal on Spotify is awesome. Yeah, that is great. Okay. Tesla or Lucid Motors? Have you seen the Lucid cars? I have. Yeah, I think they're pretty. Look, I like the underdog, so I'd go with Lucid. Lucid. And I I This is Mr. Tesla. Yeah. No, I just have a Tesla Plaid, the fastest car ever made. Stock car, right? Except for Lucid just tested.1 seconds faster 0 to 60. Okay. This one. This one's a three-headed beast. And then we're almost done. Chat GPT, Bard, or Gemini? I'm sorry. Uh, Grock or Gemini? Yeah, chat GPT. Chat GPT. What do you do? Are you doing three there or? Yeah, I did three. Which are they? All the three main ones. So, uh, Gemini, Grock, and Chat GPT. I am using Grock more, but I'm starting to use Gemini again more. We could also do Claude. We could also do I was totally chat GPT all of a sudden. Then I went to Grock and Grock was amazing. And now and and Gemini is coming up too now. They're and they keep getting better. Okay. iOS or Android? iOS. iOS. iOS. Okay. Uh Tik Tok or Instagram Reels? Tik Tok. Sorry. Um do you do either one of them? Not as much as you guys, that's for sure. But I probably am more Tik Tok because it's easier. And Instagram for some reason is not is not as easy. I do Instagram. That's interesting. Yeah, my wife would say Instagram. Yeah, I I kind of grew up on Instagram like the my college generation that's when Instagram launched and so like I've just always been on Instagram because actually I look at 10 Tik Tok as like Gen Z and and see for me as a boomer which you guys think is really old is that I probably access those more on my laptop than on my phone. Wow, that's insane. I know. That's weird. That's a weird use case. I know. Is it? Okay, last one and then we're done. I promise. Airbnb. VBO. Airbnb. Airbnb. Yeah. I used to be a huge favor of VBO, but Airbnb now has better selection, better pricing, better flexibility. Yeah. Better user experience. Way better. All right. Cool. Thank you. Awesome. We got to know Brian pretty well. Yeah, that's good. Now, let's get into the actual good stuff that people want to hear. Uh, it's just a fun game. Get to know our guests. So, thanks for everybody suffering through that. But, I thought that was kind of a cool icebreer. All right, here we go. Let's start at the very beginning. We want to hear your history. Maybe take us all the way back to that founding of Git phone and working with your dad and doing all that and then let's take it from there. So, I love like in some ways I feel like this fourth seat right here should be like my dad here telling like this other part of the story. Um because you got a father-son duo here. Oh yeah, that would have been cool. That would have been interesting. Let me let me tee it up for everybody because I'm from this a related industry and that's one thing that why we knew each other back in the day. I was in 1984, the old telephone company, American Telephone and Telegraph, AT&T. It's not the same AT&T today. It dominated the world in telecommunications. It was the phone company. They called it Ma Bell because it was so monolithic. Yeah. It was a monopoly, right? Yeah. And it got broken up in 1984, which changed the world. And that's probably when your father got into it. In 1984, they broke it into its five major business divisions got split into eight different companies having different pieces of it. To make a long story short, it had the local dial tone where you called people on a local copper wire. Then it had the metered long-d distanceance business where you had to pay to go anywhere beyond your local area to call somebody all the way up until 1980s. Huh. Per minute. Per even past 1980s. Okay. And so and then it had yellow pages and it had telephone equipment and different lines of business. So in '84 was a huge business change in America for me. I got into the yellow page business because now I could compete more fairly with the phone company on yellow pages. Your family went into long distance service because now other people could offer long distance besides just the phone company. And it was extremely lucrative. You could be a reseller of long-distance phone service and make a lot of money. I tell people it was SAS before SAS existed because it was a subscription business and you would make money while people were making calls in the middle of the night. Exactly. Yeah. And it was a subscription. And what was Yellow Pages? Yellow Pages was Google before Google. 100%. Yep. That's We all looked forward to getting our like Yellow Pages once a year like land on your like porch and you'd be like get all the latest company information that open. Back then when you wanted to know what was playing in the movie theater, you like open the yellow pages, look up movie theaters, dial and you listen to a recording, it would tell you what was playing. And so the phone the phone company was so expensive for long distance that when the federal government said no, other people can now sell that and offer that. They would offer it at half the price or whatever of the phone company and it was a heyday. So, I imagine your father and then you when you joined him were selling long distance and making great sales because you could go into a business say, "Hey, you pay you spend $1,000 a year on long distance. I'll cut it to 500." Yeah, totally. And so, you know, cut my teeth watching my dad be an entrepreneur growing up, stuffing bills for pick. We called it pick long distance, right? We'd pick your long distance carrier. Um, and so kind of went around with him in the back of his truck installing what we called like these dial routers growing up in Texas and doing a little stint in Washington state, moving back to Utah, starting another business doing the same thing. Um, and somewhere along the line, we started playing around with voiceover IP and voiceover. John talks about like this big shift in the industry in the mid1 1980s. Well, in 2000 when the internet became a thing, voice got disrupted in a in a massive way because prior to then voice was all analog over copper wires. If you want to make a phone call, you had to have a phone connected to the public switch telephone network, copper analog network. In 2000, when the internet became a thing, people for the very first time could make phone calls over the internet. We could digitize the voice, put it over the internet protocols, run it over broadband, and then de- enrypt it on the far side, put it back on an analog analog handset and make up and that changed the world forever because and again our viewers and listeners, this is the when you see things like this happen, there's so much entrepreneurial activity possible. Yep. The voice and data systems were separate. Voice and data were separate. And all of a sudden, voice and data started merging into the same network and that shook up literally and when trillions was a lot of money. Yeah. Probably several trillions of dollars of business got put into a box, shaken up and said, "Who's now going to be the entrepreneurial winner?" Yeah. Yeah. Totally. And I remember about this time, it's probably 2003, 2004, I went to the Utah Valley Big Business Expo and they did it like the convention center at UVU. And the keynote speaker, I don't even remember who it was at the time. I think it was Paul Alstrom, the lesser, the local Paul Alstrom. Um, was it Paul? Not Paul. Paul Allen. Yes. Paul. He calls himself Paul the Lesser because he's not Paul Allen for Microsoft. That's right. Yeah. But one of the most prolific startup guys in the state of Utah. Yeah. And Paul talked about the waves of technology and he talked about how, you know, you can go out and you can try to paddle under your own force, your own strength, but every once in a while these waves come along that change industries. And he's like, if you can catch a wave, it's way more fun. It moves you faster and you're moving under a different type of energy. And when we saw voiceover IP hitting the market in 2001, 2002, 2003, we thought this is the next big wave. And we were in the in communications industry and we thought this is going to disrupt everything. I was going to say how did you how did you didn't just fall into it. You were in the industry so you saw it happening before your eyes. I was so interesting like I was kind of out of the industry and kind of in the I mean I'm in the industry because my dad's in the industry but like a lot of sons I'd had no desire to follow my dad into technology. I kind of wanted to be like the apple tree that was planted on the slope and when the apple hit the ground it like roll far away. Yeah. Yeah. And and that's like not unusual for sons that want to get out of their father's shadow, but I wanted to do something in outdoor recreation. Like I grew up working at REI. It was my dream job in high school. Um I'd do climbing wall in the summer and mountain bikes and then this the winter time I'd work in the ski shop and tune snowboards and it was like a dream come true. And when I got back from my mission to Chile, um came back to Utah Valley. um got a job offer to work for Brian Fruit at Tanoga Cyclingery back when it was a tiny little bike shop on Main Street in Pleasant Grove. Um and I saw a whole different part of the outdoor recreation industry that was run by a smallcale entrepreneur who owned his own business rather than a big largecaled national international conglomerate that REI is. And there were things I loved about how Brian Fruit ran his business. I love that it was like he was at he he was behind the steering wheel and he controlled his own destiny and I just learned a lot of things about that were kind of at the junction of like this outdoor recreation industry and being an entrepreneur. And so all those kind of seeds were being planted and then one day my dad asked him asked me to come into the office to help him move an air conditioner unit. He's like I just need some muscle. Come help me move this. So, I went in and before I knew it, I was like at the whiteboard architecting a deal that he was working on and we were like riffing on it and strategizing and I found it like really intellectually stimulating. I was like, I this is actually really fun. My dad's like, "Brian, yeah, you should come do this with me." And so, I was kind of sucked back into the family business. But that only lasted for a few years because the voiceover IP thing when it hit, we realized this is not part of the business my dad had built. This has got to be something completely separate. It's going to take funding. It's going to take a lot more to launch this business. Yeah. So long distance was literally still over copper wire. It was just metered so you could charge for it compared to unlimited use locally. But voice over IP is voice over internet protocol and it was sending voice on a completely different network and you also needed different equipment. So I just want our listeners and followers uh to just know exactly what you were in the industry. So you saw the change happening because the reason I asked is before for all the the listeners and the viewers that are watching and saying, "Oh, well, Brian was at the edge of the internet or at the edge of this major shift." It's like, but how how maybe what is the advice to the current modern entrepreneur that's like catching waves like what your your mentor said? You don't catch waves sitting on the shore. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Like the key here is being in be in whatever you're in be in. Like I think 95% of all great business ideas are going to come because you're already in an industry. You're already working. You're already actively engaged in something that intellectually stimulates you and then you have another idea about how you can do it a little bit better or you see a change coming or you see a wave coming. The good thing is waves don't stop, right? There's always continuing continuously happening all the time. And we t we tend to sometimes look around at, you know, what's going on on social media, what's going on in Crunch Base. Yeah, I missed that wave. Like, I missed my shot. Like, I can't believe that was the company I would have started. Um, how many times have we looked around and said, I had that idea and I talked about that idea 10 years ago. And then you see somebody do it, you're like, if only, right? I do remember thinking that about you a little bit. I was like, oh yeah, of course my dad made a lot of money and took a company IPO cuz he was in the dot era. Like, everybody was doing that at the time. There's already been two or three cycles since the do. Yeah. So, the waves keep coming. That's the whole point for the viewer is like you just have to be, you're right, be in, identify and execute, right? And the well never runs dry. Like we talk about this analogy like there's always more water in the well. It always fills back up. I I like to say to people too is when you get bothered by something too, you say, "Oh, why is it done this way? It could be so much better. I could fix it. It could be better." And then people just don't act on that. What I tell them is when you think something needs to be fixed, why don't you see if you can fix it and create a great company from it? Yes. When John talked about in the beginning, he was very complimentary of my ability to pitch and fundraise. One of the big keys of pitching and fundraising is try to have an emotional connection with your audience that identifies the pain. Yeah. Right. If you can identify the pain, the problem like John just talked about, um then you can start articulating the solution. And if you can convince folks, and this isn't just about funding, this is about getting team members to join you, getting partners to partner up with you. As a founder, you're always selling to someone. You're always selling. You're always kind of in this mode of pitching. Yeah. Right. So CEO's job number one, sell, sell, sell. Okay. So you discovered VoIP. Let's go from there then. So you thought let's do let's move from long distance. Did your father go into the VoIP business with you too or? Yes. My dad was kind of at the end of his career and he's kind of like Brian like I really don't want to do this as part of beline long distance the family business. So I started kind of incubating this idea on the side. Formed the company formed the kind of LLC alansa. And you're going to school. And I'm going to school at BYU studying history. Yeah. Where we met. I'm taking John's entrepreneurial lecture series class. Um and so this business idea is kind of just incubating over here on the side. I'm I took the GMAT. I'm like it's my senior year of school. I'm planning on going to business school. Um did really well on the GMAT. Had a lot of opportunity there. And I was taking the entrepreneurial lecture series class for the second time. It was the best class experience I ever had at in the university. Yeah. Um, so much so that after I got my grade the first time, second semester came around, um, I decided to take the class again and just audit it. And I was like, so I signed up again and I took it again. And it was during that second semester, um, that the announcement was made about the business plan competition. And I thought, all right, well, where are we going to put this voiceover IP technology to use and we kind of had a use case around international long distance that would really change the game. And our whole thesis was around there's international enterprises that have operations on different sides of international borders and the local calling is you know relatively cheap. Long-distance calling is extremely expensive. International toll calling back then $2 a minute was not uncommon. Oh yeah. A minute to make an international call between United States and Mexico, United States and Brazil, Argentina, Chile, like you name it. And so our idea was let's take that phone call and let's go sign up these enterprise customers. put little pieces of equipment on both sides of the border next to their phone systems and let's put that call onto the internet and let's make it essentially what we call an on-net phone call. And we said if you go with us for onet calls, we're going to make them free. We're not going to charge you anything. But then when you make those other little local toll calls, we're going to call you. We're going to charge you for those and we're going to make a little bit of money. Yeah. And so that was the first business model of Aliana. That was it. That's what And that was the business plan and the business plan competition. And that's what you took to the competition. That's exactly what we did. Did you do you remember that pitch? Yes. You do? Mhm. Was he a judge or or John was yeah involved and a mentor and and this is like because you were in his class so you had already you guys have already met well that was a lecture shares class but I was also very involved in running the business plan competition and he became one of the participants and we wanted to make sure they were really wellprepared and did well and this is one of the business plan competition ran all year long kind of just with preparatory things and at the end of the school year we brought in major investors to see the final pitches. Yeah. Yeah. nervous as could be, right? I'm a 24 year old. I'm like kind of taking the long route through school, working my way through school, working full-time while I'm going to school. Um, and at the end of the competition, they narrow it down to 12 out of the 64 teams. You go through multiple rounds of kind of judging and so forth. And at the end, you have this boardroom in the Tanner building where we went and there's 12 in like real legit investors and you're pitching your idea to them and then they make the final judgment call. Um, super invigorating like really exciting and fun. Was that the pitch se session you're talking about or was that after that is when we had the investment though later with the to really talk about early Utah Angels group Angels. So that this investor group was just part of the business plan competition judges. But if obviously if you do well in spring and BYU had one of the most successful business plan competitions in the country and so if you do well at that you're going to get lots of attention. So, is that the connecting piece? Like you did pretty well in that. You got pretty high and or won. Yeah. No, we won it. We won the whole thing. It's weird cuz there was 64 teams. We were It was me and my co-founder Scott Bell and neither one of us was an NBA student. Every other team, every other single team was an was a conglomerate of NBA students that built their business plan. Well, like it was super. I think John has his opinions on the NBA students. So, there's no that's not it just Yeah. They're just they're just not as risk tolerant, let's just say, right? They'll come up with great ideas, but they actually won't go out and execute. You two were going out and executing, right? So, so that's the connecting piece from the business plan competition to the Utah Angels. Like, how close were those? It's a super fun story, but like I remember we won the business plan competition. And then John and Gary Williams were like, "Brian, we want you to go do this. Like, let's figure out a way for you to like go start this company." I was like, "You guys, like you've you've read the business plan. you know that 64,000 bucks, as awesome as that is, is not going to launch this business. Yeah. And they said, "Well, we'll help you raise some capital." I was like, "All right, well, what are we going to do?" And there was a couple different ideas. One was, and the first thing that like started the funding ball rolling for us is they said, "Let's publish an article in the Daily Universe. Um, let's put a picture of the you with the big $64,000 check and your co-founder Scott Bell, and let's tell what Aliance is doing and how you're going to change the world." Um, and then let's wait for the phone to ring. And the phone rang. I was stunned. the phone rang and we and it rang again and then we had, you know, we kind of identified we said we want to raise $2 million. Um, which I thought was a little was a little bit crazy, a little bit audacious. Um, John and others seem to think we could do it. And we had a core group of investors that were kind of circling around the deal. But I would call them very much friends and family, but not sophisticated investors like and not even like if you think about like this hierarchy of like private equity, venture capital, kind of working your way down in kind of levels of sophistication, angels, and then you got kind of friends and family and people that know you and would invest in you and take a chance on you, but have no idea what they're getting into. Yep. We had a small group of friends and family that had kind of were had I would say excited and supportive but were kind of looking around for and who's the smart money that's going to lead this. Yeah. Right. And so that's where the Utah Angels come in and that's where John brokered this meeting with Kyle Love um and a bunch of other Utah Angels. Um and we got a I don't where was the meeting John? Do you remember? Like it was off campus I believe I think in somebody's conference room here in Provo. Yeah. Yeah. just some random. We're not in Provo now, but in Provo. Yeah. Yeah. And it was it was great. So, I got to go pitch the Utah Angels, spend a couple hours with them getting kind of I'll say like beat up and a lot of really tough questions. But why is this so infamously like a grill session? Like you talked about I would look at it as a friendly conversation. Back then I'm like you were just a novice and you were just like but he's because he's one stu he's a current student at student. Okay. and he's in with at least eight really seasoned investors. And but here's the funny thing and this is for listener viewers to understand. When investors behave that way, that is true interest. Yes. You got to understand when politeness and not much talking happens in a pitch session, that's not good. That's not good. What you want is you want them on the edge of their seat pummeling you with questions. And that's what happened to him. And he did so well. I'm not kidding. I I you know of the like I said thousands I've seen and let's even say I he's definitely in the top 02%. No. Yeah. We we definitely have venture pitches that were grilling the founder but that that that is an indicator of interest. Right. So walk me through that pitch session like what advice would you give to today's entrepreneurs that are going into like a makeorb breakak pitch situation? Um, if you're looking for advice going into that make orb breakak pitch session, it might be too late for my advice. My advice would be it would actually like what prepared me for that pitch session was months and months of working on the business plan and the pitch like that business plan was a huge blessing for us. Yeah. To be able to be a part of that competition. I still have every one of the 24 versions of the business plan that I wrote. Yeah. Like I have hard copies of every single one. I have digital copies of every one. I keep them in a little special folder on my computer to remind paper. Yeah. I guess this is what they were all It was all typed up, right? It was really nice. I had them like I'd go to Kinko's and get them hard spiral bound. Um and every time we'd do a little change or anything, we would go get another copy printed cuz we're like, "All right, the next round of conversations we're going to have, we're going to give an updated version." Well, what would happen is every time I would go into a a pitch, informal or formal, with a BYU mentor or somebody that had been assigned to us by the business plan competition to look over our business plan. Um, I would listen for their feedback and I would listen to the questions and then I would take the what I would say like the cha most challenging questions and I would try to incorporate answers of those into the business plan and into the pitch. Right. And there is nothing that makes you great at pitching like pitching. Yes. Like the more you can pitch, the better you are on your feet. The better the more you get the hard questions and even the questions that will completely stump you. I would walk away saying thank you like this is specifically. Let me just share what you've heard me say this a thousand times and now here's where it came from. Brian would I would be listening as an investor, write down a question I wanted to ask during Q&A and then in the presentation he would answer that question before I had a chance to ask it because you were so familiar. Yeah, when that happens, an investor goes, "Man, this is a seal that's on his game. I could invest in him." And then and then I want to say during the Q&A, which is most of the time of any kind of meeting, when we asked a question, he would go, "Good question. Let me answer that." And he knew how to go to a slide that was like a backup slide and explain it to me. Yeah. So there's there's two different really good like there's one really great thing that I learned really early on and I learned this from Gavin Christensen because he was like my what do they call him like my NBA mentor because we we didn't have any NBAs on our team. They signed Gavin and I dude struck of lo luck to get Gavin to sign me still a good friend to this day still a great supporter. Um Gavin introduced me to the book guy Kawasaki art of the start. Um and guy in that book talks about there's it's like the 10 2030 rule. um 10 slides. There's 10 very specific slides and you have to keep it super simple. And the pitch itself is like you got to like kind of dumb it down to make it's almost like 10 individual little elevator pitches. It's 10 slides, 20 minutes, 30 point font and you got to be able to get through your entire pitch, hit the competitive dynamics, the solution in start ignition. We exactly what we teach. And then you have your ending slide and then behind that I would have my appendix. Yeah. of everything chalk full. Yeah. of everything else that I would know. All right. This is like my utility belt that whatever else gets thrown at me, I got a slide I can go to to answer a question if it's not already in one of the first 10. So, one of the things like when you're preparing is you want to ask yourself, what's the three hardest questions an investor could ever ask me that would really expose my weaknesses and have an answer for them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so, you were just good at that. And again, maybe you could say it was that business plan competition that prepared you months and months and months of time going over it and getting so familiar. Yeah. Look, and if you don't have a business plan or if you haven't entered into a business plan competition, it's also mentorship though, too. There's mentorship and there is a lot there are a lot of people out there that if you call them and say, "Hey, I would love to do lunch with you." I mean, I can't tell you the number of I'm not like soliciting this like broadly. Yeah. um because I'd like book out lunches for weeks in advance. But if there is an entrepreneur that calls me, reaches out on LinkedIn, emails me, messages me, texts me, you name it, and says, "Hey, I'm a startup CEO. I'm trying to figure this out. Can I pick your brain for 30 minutes? Can I do lunch?" Yep. The answer is always yes. Yeah. I think you got three guys at this table that are always going to say yes to those. Yeah. Why? Because we've been on the other side of that. And I had people early on in my career that said yes. That changed the trajectory of my career, my life. And like so I will 100% those hard questions you had to answer to they had to come from somewhere. It's mentorship. It's those people that told those and pulled those out and and pulled your attention to them. Yeah. And there's something really powerful about at a point in time in entrepreneurial journey. Every entrepreneur's journey we have self-doubt and we question is this a good idea? Can I really succeed at this? Is there something here? when you get in front of other smart business people, people that have more experience than you, that have done this before, um, that will pressure test your ideas, and if they come out on the other end of that saying, I think there's something here. I think you should keep going. What a boost of confidence. Like, and I've done this for people at John Sendway. I'm like, hey, don't give up. Keep going. Like, you have something here. When it gets really hard, guess what? That's really good news because all of your competition that's at the same phase trying to figure this out and it gets really hard, most of them are going to drop off. Yeah. If you stick with it, there's a great chance you can succeed. Yeah. So, was the business model that you went through the business plan competition the same that you pitched to the Utah Angels? 100% the same. Okay. So, then you pitched and we funded you. Yep. And and then raised how much we million bucks. You raised the 2 million. Yes. We raised the $2 million, closed the round, got to work, um grew the business, had a really great year. Um 2004 to 2005 was awesome. I think we went from 0 to 2, not quite zero. I mean, we had a little bit like $10,000 a month and we went to $250,000 a month. Wow. Over the course of a year. Um had our first million dollar quarter and then decided to go back out and raise a series B round. Um so probably 16 18 months later. Um that round um we did, you know, we did the whole kind of Silicon Valley Sand Hill Road tour and ended up selecting a local Utah VC um that's now Signal Peak was Vspring Capital at the time. Um, and it was Scott Petty was the main partner. And I remember I had a term sheet. I had two term sheets from Silicon Valley. Um, and I had another local VC term sheet and then I had the term sheet from Scott Petty. And I had board members that were pretty adamant that I should take the out ofstate Silicon Valley money. And I will just tell you like in retrospect, there are there are decisions we make that change the trajectory of our story that we don't understand the impact of at the time. Um, selecting this the term sheet from Signal Peak and Scott Petty was one of those moments for me. Yeah. Um, I feel like I lucked out with the most patient, supportive, kind of committed investor you could imagine. Um, he's just been great over many I mean he's been in Alonsa now for 18 going on 19 years. What other VC would you imagine sticking around for that long, believing, supporting um, and encouraging over that long a period of time? And it does, and we'll get into this, it doesn't mean that it's been like a smooth road the whole time. Like, there's a lot of times when our our our incentives are misaligned. Our our hopes about how we view the company evolving differ. Um, and there's been some really hard conversations over that 19-year period. Um, but when you get people that stick with you through that, boy, like do you come out of that with strong relationships, trust, great stories. Yeah. So walk me through the next few years after that. So the next few years get really interesting. So I know you run into 2008. So that that first uh investment from Vespring was what year? 2006. 2006. Okay. Yep. So it was about 2004 I think we did the angel investment. 2005. 2005 was so it's about 16 18 months later we did the round. You were chugging along 250k a month. You went out into the VC world. You raised a good healthy, right? Like things are great. We're building the team. We're winning customers. Um, and then we all on this VOIPE. Yeah. All doing all selling multinational enterprises on cloud communication systems where we're taking their voice and putting it on the internet for the very first time. Yep. Yeah. And being able to save a lot of money in long-distance telecommunications. Totally. But it was a services business. Yes. Meaning as we scaled the business, there was a lot like we had to scale our sales team. sales in you know scale install and support and marketing and finance and collections and so was one of the really early lessons I learned is like the business was scaling at the same rate that our headcount was scaling and I was like all right we have a business here it's it's growing we've proven product market fit and we think we can continue to scale this business and so we went out into the market and we're think now two years later now fast forward to early let's see 2006 2007 early 2008 we have a a term sheet signed for a $6 million series Now, everybody that's probably listening is like, "Oh, $6 million serious C." Back in 2008, that was actually a pretty big deal. Yeah, for sure. Numbers have changed a lot since then. Um, but we actually got term sheets signed, then we got definitive documents signed, and we thought, you know, great, we're going to go raise a serious C and we're going to keep growing the business. And we thought this was kind of the last round we'd ever do. Like, you know, famous words of an entrepreneur, this is the last round we'll ever do. Yeah. Um, don't ever say that because things change. Um, but in the midst of when the deal was finalizing and coming together, the market was falling apart. The market was falling apart like it never had before. Like in in many many many years. When you say the market, people are going to think maybe you're just talking about your market. Yeah. I'm talking about the US economy. You actually need to say the world's economy. The world economy caused by US housing crisis. Um, venture funds were publishing articles to entrepreneurs calling it like the Holocaust. like like buckle up. This is going to be painful. It's going a lot of companies will die. Um, buckle up and get ready for a long and it really was and it really was bad recovery, but you raised the 6 million in 2008. So, all right. Okay. So, you had the term sheet set. So the important thing for our viewers and listeners to know especially those that maybe weren't alive then or in the business world um which would count on it'd be your situation is 2008 was the beginning of what many people had not seen since the great depression. Yeah. It was that bad of an economy. It was just it was really difficult. And so what had happened is we are we like I said we closed what we thought was the round um all except for the funding. Um, meanwhile, back up six months, our current investors had been bridgeling the company funds and and surviving on everything we could to get to this round. Um, and when I say everything we could, we can get into it if John wants to. Um, but there was a lot of like, let's say, rookie inexperienced decision-m that took place. And when our board said, "Brian, stretch every penny you have." We literally stretched every penny we had. We made some really bad decisions, including um not paying our payroll taxes. So, we would like, you know, pay people and we would withhold payroll taxes, but we're like, "Okay, cool. This round's coming. It's going to come like six months from now. We're just going to withhold those taxes. We're going to use them for operating the business, and when the round closes, we'll pay our taxes and catch back up." Um problem was that round never closed. The investor that we had signed documents with um failed on their capital call. Their limited partner didn't come through. And that happened that happened to everybody in 2008. 2008 2008 it really kind of started and started hitting Utah in August 2007. But going from January 2008 to December 2008 was one of the worst business periods in history. Was really difficult. And the great recession for a reason. Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy. And so we're literally like just scraping by and then the round falls apart and our investors are left hanging out there with a bunch of bridge loans that are converting now into round that just evaporated in the worst economic market since the Great Depression. And so now we have like big conundrum on our hands. And I had investors that would come to me say Brian like you should you should throw in the towel like this is not going to work. And I had probably why because of the debt that because of the convertible debt. Yeah. The convertible debt that was hanging out there. the terms is horrible. If if it doesn't convert to equity, it's got to be paid back at a at some point. Yeah, it's debt. But and and unless you had a or sometimes convertible debt, for our viewers and listeners, know convertible debt starts as debt. It's intended to be triggered by the next equity round and convert into that equity round. But if the equity round doesn't come, there's usually a term a length to that debt and there's a day of reckoning where it has to be paid back in cash or it can such a low rate that it wipes everybody else out. Is that what that's what happened? Yeah. Now hold that thought. So meantime inside the business, remember we're competing in Latin America and we're essentially like we'd opened up nine branch offices. We had a team of 70 people selling services to enterprise customers and the largest competitor we faced was TMX. Telmmex is owned by Carlos Slim, one of the wealthiest people in the world who had built his wealth off the back of Telm, the largest telco in Latin America and they own 96% of the market and they were also the largest ISP. So they're selling internet services and phone services. And somewhere along the last the prior two years journey, they figured out what this little company Alian Getphone in Utah was doing. We were convincing their customers to drop their high margin voice services with Tel and put their voice on top of their internet that we didn't pay anything for. Right. And this is back before net neutrality. So, so just to be super clear, uh, uh, South American business could, which was paying a lot of money at Telmix for long-distance calls to go beyond their local calling and instead they went onto the internet with your software and tools and did those same voice calls for free. That's right. Totally. And so, paying you a flat subscription. Yeah. Paying us a subscription fee, right? Yeah. And so, TMEX figured out what we were doing. enough customers left, we got enough press, like it was a really interesting kind of lot of buzz around the business in Latin America. And so, Telmx, like I said, this is before net neutrality. Telmex started blocking ports, like literally blocking our traffic in and out of Mexico. And so, we would do things like then we'd change our ports to something else and we get the traffic back up and running. All right, we survived like we're back in business. And they would figure out the new ports, they'd start blocking those. Um, and it became this game of like whack-a-ole where we're like dynamically changing which internet ports we use to get into Latin America and get out. Um and the and meanwhile the revenue that had been on kind of this nice smooth up into the right curve stagnated and you got like three quarters in a row of just revenue choppy water choppy choppy water and choppy in the sense like we're now facing big existential risk on two different fronts inside the business. One funding um and just and the whole dynamic around our series C round falling apart. two was all around the technology itself and the competitive threat of the the dominant operator in the market. Um, they weren't a national company. They weren't like a countrybacked or governmentbacked. They were governmentbacked, but then they'd been privatized by Carlos Slim. I was going to say I thought Tel was the Mexican tele. They were for a very long time until Carlos Slim bought it and privatized it. Hey, I need to pause because this is important for viewers and listeners and just to for me too. When you did the payroll tax thing, I just want to say this. You did get in trouble for that. Yeah. And you had to pay penalties 100% and and you cleared it up and did the right thing and everything and you you know everybody understands why you did it and what you did. I just want everybody to understand that you know none of us at this table would condone that to do that and that's probably something you should avoid at all costs. I just want to make sure and and you were you the idea was in a month or two you were going to get money and it wouldn't be a big deal. Yeah. Look, because we had a term she'd signed from a reputable when the money didn't come, it became a big deal and you did get into some hot water from it and you and but you took care of it and took care of it. I just want everybody to know Brian's one of the most honest integrity guys I know. Legal legal legal trouble. There's like certified mail delivered to my house saying, "Hey, like you got to pay these taxes or else don't mess with the tax paid interest and penalty." I'm sure that's just the way it goes in business. And that's the thing I just want everybody to know because we teach, you know, that's one thing to avoid and you just don't want to do that. It's way better to go get a mentor and get help and find some other way to come up with some extra cash than that as a source of cash. Yeah. Anyway, I just want to make sure back to this though. Keep going. Tell me. So tell all right so we kind of decided somewhere along this journey that like look the the market's bad, the funding's bad, we can't go out and raise money. We're either going to have to like significantly reduce force in the company. um or we're gonna have to find a partner or sell the company. Yeah. And so we started talking with AT&T about partnering with us. We said, "Look, AT&T terminates a substantial amount of Telmx's traffic back into the United States." So when one of these Mexican customers or Latin American at the time it was a long distance company. So it is the old AT&T that kept the long distance. Yeah. It was a joint venture in Mexico under the brand name. They went by either AT&T, Latin America or Lstra at the time. Um, and we thought, all right, they're terminating a bunch of traffic for Latin American enterprise customers that call back to United States. They have a vested interest in what we're doing. So, we started talking to them about a partnership and they said, you know what, we're way better at buying than by part than partnering. Would you be interested to a transaction where we buy the company? And of course, we were like, absolutely. challenge was it wasn't really like there wasn't a substantial return for investors in this. Um, and at the last minute they came back and said, "Look, we really we like the product, we like the brand, we like the channel and the customers you've built. We think this is like the future of business communications, but we're not interested in buying your platform and the intellectual property you've built. We would really like it if you would operate that for us for 6 months while we move all these customers to an in-house platform that we built using Cisco infrastructure." And at the time Cisco is a big market leader. You have the old adage, nobody gets fired for choosing Cisco. And so we said, "Okay, sure. Let's do it." Um, so we essentially like went back to our investors and John will remember this. We had some meetings with them. We're like, "Hey, we can either return these royalties back to our investors or we have the next business idea. If you're interested, we think we got something that's way bigger, way more interesting, way more compelling, and we're going to pivot the company." In this transaction, we ended up with the intellectual property to the platform and we're currently managing it on behalf of AT&T. So this business plan and the next hypothesis was what if we created this multi-tenant architecture around the platform now and we could license it to many different broadband operators and telos and we could become the backend for all of their core communications network. And mind you like this is at a point in time when all the communications providers globally are deploying physical hardware and software and managing it inside their networks. And we're come we were the first in the market watching you know on the heels of Netflix and AWS and some of the early cloud innovators to say we should put this software stack in the cloud. We should be you know a fully managed cloud operating platform for service providers. And our investors every single one of them said we'll support you on the next journey. We'll roll it forward, Brian. Keep going. And so we did. It wasn't without bumps and bruises because remember, we're just on the heels of this transaction. AT&T took 70 of our 78 employees or so. We're left with a small team of employees managing this platform starting from ground zero essentially with one customer. Now, um, and this round of capital that we were just going to raise had just fallen apart months earlier. And so we and we hadn't paid back our bridge loans. And so now we had a decision like how are we going to fund this? How are because it wasn't profitable at this point. We only had the one customer and we thought if we're going to grow this it's going to take more capital. And that required another really hard discussion with investors board members around recapitalizing the company. And this is often like people think the word recapitalized they kind of cringe. When I think of the word recapitalization it means a reattribution of value based on new money that's coming in. It's a survival tactic. Yeah. Because in some ways, like look, this is this is one of like the great things about having sophisticated investors around the table. I'm I'm supremely grateful for John and other investors that like helped hold my hand through this process of like, Brian, this isn't the end of the story. This isn't wiping away kind of your equity or your wealth, but you have a new class of investor that's willing to continue to back you. you have to reset expectations on valuation with your old investors and specifically your old investors that are no longer willing to back you. And there was kind of a separation in those investors like those that were you know willing to continue to fund the company and those that wouldn't or couldn't and kind of had to lick their wounds on the prior results of Alian 1.0. So did you sell the company to AT&T or that product? We ended up doing an asset sale where they purchased the customer base, the revenue, the brand. Was there no Aliana 1.0 the product was sold to AT&T 70 of 78 employees went there and then Aliana 2.0 the new business model a pivot stayed with about eight employees and the problem though is that entity kept the debt and had to find a way to relieve that debt. There no there was no cash or transaction from that. Remember it was a royalty. So they were giving us a royalty to manage the platform on their behalf. Yes. And they and at first it was hey we're going to run this for you for 6 months while you move it to your Cisco platform. Well that 6 months ended up being 6 years and they became an anchor tenant on what became the alliance that exists today. Yeah. So what happened though what he's talking about in this recapapitalization we would call it a down round or a cradown. What the end result was, it was a paytoplay where if you were going to continue and support them as an existing investor, put new money in and then there's new money is coming in from or that situation. If you put money in, you kind of held your position and your percentage in the company going forward. But if you didn't pay to play, you were going to get seriously crammed down in your val in your percentage of the company. My specific recollection, if I can share it, I for instance had about I think 3% of the company or I can't remember or I don't know 2 point whatever percent of the company and I was going to go down to 1/100th of that. Yeah. If I didn't put more money in but I was one of the last ones to say I'd put more money in because there were two things I didn't like. I didn't think they were kind of committing firmly enough to Brian and how his situation would be afterwards. And so I came in and said you need a way for us to protect our position as investors and you got to get Brian. He is the CEO. this is his company. He's got to be at the helm. I want to have asurances before I put this money in that he's getting enough percentage of this company going forward to make him the CEO manager he needs to be. I remember saying that specifically. I stood up and said to every and they did change things to make that all happen. I think one half hour before the deadline and put my money in. No, it was I can remember it was like Christmas Eve and I was in a movie with my family on a Saturday and like step out from the movie, take a call from John, talk with one of my board members. We're down to kind of this like term around my personal stake in the business and what was going to be the treatment of my founders shares and I'd kind of drawn a line in the sand and John John gave me like the fortitude like Brian get a firm back firm constitution stand up and say this is where I'm at and if this doesn't work I'm out. Yeah. And and I I remember like John is just like so not my style to like finally draw a line in the sand. He's like, "Brian, you just have to know where your kind of cut off point is where it no longer makes sense for you." And he's like, "I need like for him to come in and invest." He's like, "I need you here and I need you fully committed." And I was like, "Well, if you want me fully committed, this is what it's going to take." Yeah. And it would not have worked. It would not have worked without Brian. That's the problem that as an investor. Yeah. Sure. I like Brian. I wanted to do good by Brian. But it's actually thinking of everybody and the company. Brian had to be the one going forward. Anyway, I'm glad how that worked out because they it we got the deal done with all the right things happening. Yeah, totally. And this was kind of our second near-death experience. And that's when Brian and I really That's when Brian and I we were just kind of really got in the same Yeah. tent together. Yeah. And I I I just I I felt good about what I was doing for Brian, but and he was grateful for it. And then after that, Brian took the company. Tell the rest of the story on the 2.0 idea. Yeah. So then I mean look I wouldn't say like the hard times were over but we certainly had like a new lease on life and by 2010 we we kind of so fast forward how much of an injection of cash was put into Alonza at that time from that cramming down and then you optioning back up and it was not as much as you would think it was like there was 20 ended up being over 24 bridge loans put into the business and over 20 when I say small sub 50,000 60,000 equity investments like like a crumb here. I'm going to guess between one and two million something like that. Yeah. Couple like what did you So what did you do with the the notes then? Did they just disappear and No. Then so then we ended up raising doing this recap raising a bunch of money converting all the notes into that round into that round. So everybody that had invested in notes and convertibles all the clean up all the debt cleaned up all the debt and gave us was a complete recapitalization of everything even everybody. You can't recapitalize without recapitalizing everything. But yes, that's awesome. Yeah. And then so fast forward two more years, we felt like this new model of essentially providing a cloud communications platform for operators was getting legs. Um on on the heels of the Great Recession, when we were at the bottom of it, the government came out with this American Reinvestment and Recovery Act. Um very similar to other ones they've done since, but where they invest money into infrastructure. And one of the areas they decided to invest money into was rural broadband buildout. And so there was immense amount of public government funding available to ISPs and entrepreneurs that were building new companies. And we thought to ourselves, hey, this is a great early market for us. We're going to go because a lot of the entrenched legacy kind of top telos had their way of doing things and they were working with very wellestablished operators or vendors, right? Yeah. Like Cisco that I mentioned before. And so we thought, all right, here's a new what we called green field market. These are new startups. they're going to be entering the market for the very first time. They don't have this century long history of providing voice services like the Telos do. We can go provide them with this solution. So, we went in, we made a name for oursel in that market and we signed up 20 customers. Um, by that point, we'd probably doubled revenue back, you know, we were kind of back to where we were and double that. So, we're probably like almost approaching $5 million a year in revenue. And then something really terrible happened. All of those government loans started coming due. The first payment started coming due. And what the government did not realize is the time that was needed between deployment of capital and building out of these new networks and then monetizing those how long that would really take. And within a six-month period, half of our customers declared bankruptcy. Um, this was kind of, you know, the third near-death experience at Aliana where we finally felt like, all right, we, you know, we built this company up to4 million dollars a month. We almost died. We sold it. We got a new lease on life. We recapitalized the company. We went out, found their second product market fit, and then half our customers went bankrupt and the other ones kind of just stagnated or went away. Yeah. Um, terribly difficult time. Um, and somehow, I mean, there's a whole slew of like like longer stories and little miracles that like helped us survive, but the business survived. And on the heels of that, um, emerged a company that has now rattled off almost 14 years of consecutive growth without a down quarter. um what you learned through those hard times, like the grit you develop, the stick tuitiveness, the fortitude. Now, when hard things come along, we we don't even flinch. We're just like, of course, we'll be fine. Like, we'll get through this. Like, we've seen way worse. Was there was there a tipping point in that journey of where you felt you were out of just survival mode and you were into scaling growth mode like where you felt like oh my gosh I'm out of the crap and I'm into the up and the right or was it did it always just kind of feel like I'm just building I'm just adding on revenue. Yeah I think for me and I don't know if this is like a personality trait I don't ever really feel like I've arrived. I feel like I'm on a journey that I signed up for that never really I've never really felt closure or finality or like hey like the end of the book is written yet. I mean this is what one of the things that's really interesting about the Aliana journey is I'm now 20 years into it. I'm having the best time I've ever had as an entrepreneur. Yeah, let's get let's get into too because right now Aliana just even in the last few months has become a major player, done major acquisitions. Your revenues going through the roof, all of that. But refresh again, how did you segue from those 10 going bankrupt customers out of the 20 and how did you get to where you're so wildly successful? Okay, so I will tell the story. So yeah, real just real quickly. Yeah. All right, so we essentially like half our customers had declared bankruptcy. All of a sudden our revenue is cut in half. We're burning cash like crazy again. and we have less than six months survival and we know look we have like we have eaked every ounce of patience out of our investors. They've taken two different chances on us. This is the third strike. There's no way we can go back to them. Did you go back to them? We did not. So there was one company amongst all those wireless ISPs that was two orders of magnitude larger than the next closest one. It was a company called Clearwire. Clear Wire had raised a few billion dollars in in financing. bought a bunch of spectrum and was deploying what they called the the world's first YAX network. YAX essentially sat in between 2G and 3G um on wireless evolution. And I remember I saw a conference where their president of the company um Mike Severt who you might recognize that name went on to do some really cool things at T-Mobile and others um was speaking at a conference in Chicago called YAX World. I thought, you know what? If I could just convince Mike of what we're doing and the value that we could bring them, they could that one customer could save our business. Um, and because I'm staring at a cliff on revenue and I'm like, look, like the time time's like clicking, clocks ticking down. There's there's one shot we have here. Um, and I cornered Mike after his keynote speech at the conference and I gave him like the 30 secondond elevator pitch and I gave him my business card and he said, "Brian, here's who you need to talk to inside the company. Gentleman named John Saw who's the CTO of the company. He's like, "You need to talk to John. John owns this decision." Um, I said, "Would you introduce me to him?" And that spawned a two-month flurry of activity where we somehow convinced Clear Wire to sign a commercial contract with us. Um, what's really interesting is at the same time we're doing that, there was one other customer that we'd kind of been dancing with for a year and a half called Vioad. They were the one of the first satellite broadband companies to ever launch. So, we talked today about like Starlink and um SpaceX launching like the low earth orbit satellite networks. These guys were um geocynchronous orbit, so a little bit higher altitude satellites, but they launched the industry's first and kind of preeminent back in the day satellite broadband network. We'd been testing with them and doing proof of concepts for over a year and a half, but we could just never get a commercial deal over the the finish line. So, we had these two customers that kind of either one of them signing with us would kind of we felt like ensure business continuity going forward. But neither one of I remember both of these companies coming out and meeting with us at our tiny little shared space conference room where our you know co-founder Scott Bell who ran finance at the time his office was in the break room and he literally room half the size of this room and half of it was like our utility where there was like you know napkins and markers and toilet paper and and then the other side was our our snack room which is like the other snack room right it was just the other it was a like bookshelf with peanut M&M's and like Redvines and whatever else that would like keep us going and these and then you'd have like you know one of the most successful wireless ISPs in the world sent their BD guy to come talk to us and walked through the office and then this Jim Esserman who was the um EVP over corporate development at Viasat came out like two weeks later both of them independently told me Brian like we love you guys we love what you're doing technology is cool there's just no way we can work with a company your size like you're just too small And so we kind of derived this like conniving plan that we would write up a press release for both deals as if we'd won them. And then we sent them to each other saying essentially like, "Hey, they're signing with us. Like this deal like you're not going to be the only big customer. We're going to have two anchor customers. You're going to be the second one." Um so drisisk the deal for them, right? And somehow both of them independently said, "All right, we're in." Like we changed the tide. like both those have like twists and turns and a longer story. I'll spare you the details, but we signed both those deals and our revenue went north of a million dollars a month. Wow. Um within six months like it was fast. Um now the flip side of this, like I I'll give you like this is our fourth near-death experience. Okay. And there's you'll see why. Um within two months after closing the Clear Wire deal, Clearwire announced that it was getting bought by Sprint. and Sprint came out immediately and said, "We only wanted Clear Wire for the Spectrum that they own. We do not want their customers. We don't want their business model. We're shutting it down." Wow. And so over the course of the next, we kind of knew then that this million-doll a month revenue stream that we had um was going to zero over the next three years. And so we knew we had three years to develop an alternate business plan and an alternate model and a new customer segment that we had to go deploy and and find product market fit and scale before we ran out of cash again. Um and luckily we did that. It took you know VIA three more years to launch their satellite and get into market and start scaling revenue. Um but in that time period we went out and signed our first cable company up um and slowly started scaling the business and that's I mean that's 20 let's see 20 2010 2013 probably since 201 Gez trying to think 2012 um haven't had a down quarter in revenue. Wow. Yeah. Awesome. That's exciting. And uh real quick to end because we're short on time, right? So, um, you you might have, uh, just looking at where we're at in the last few months, though, like the biggest things have happened to your company just in like the last just what's happened recently that's so big to give our listeners and viewers a a kind of an idea of the magnitude of what you're doing. Yeah. All right. So, kind of, you know, company been growing really nicely. Um, surpassed 250 employees every, like I said, every quarter is just a little bit up into the right like it's the little engine that could like just we just kept plugging away. Um and we de developed something really special in the market that takes a lot of investment over more than a decade to be able to build what we've built. It's a highly technical um platform with relatively small sales and marketing team, right? And so we kind of every chance we'd had along the way, we'd always invested in technology and we kind of had this underlying belief and thesis that if we developed the best platform that eventually eventually would sell itself and the market would turn our way. So every time we had a choice on like where do we invest our capital invest in sales or marketing or product it was always product and over the course of the last few years we realized that we now had something that had a defensible moat around it right it wasn't just competing in the market with great positioning great marketing it was competing in the market from a position of product superiority and our competitors started to see it and some of those competitors being much much larger than had no product roadmap. Like they'd kind of given up on the ability to cloudify their legacy solutions and just said, "We're going to manage these for cash." Yeah. One of those was Microsoft. Um Microsoft had a product line that we were really interested in um based on a technology called Meta Switch. Um two and a half years ago, we made a unsolicited inbound offer to Microsoft to buy that business. And they kind of laughed us out of the room. There's no way. Like there's no way we're selling this business. It's core to what we do. We're really excited about it. Um get out of here. And once a quarter we'd kind of reach back out, kind of keep them warm. Hey, how's it going? Like here's here's what we could do with this if we owned it. Here's what we'd be doing and we think it actually really benefits Microsoft and here's how it ties into your strategy. And the answer for two and a half years pretty consistently was no. And then on June 3rd last year, 2024, the phone rang and it was the corp of Azure and he said, "Brian, are you still ready to do this deal?" said kind of caught me off guard and I was like absolutely yes. Like let's go. Um, and so when I when he said, "Brian, hey, speed is really important to us. Like, we wanna we want to move really quickly." It took us less than a week to have a term sheet in front of him. And then it took six more months of working through the Microsoft machine to get from term sheet to definitive agreement signed. Um, and then it took another three months to close the deal. So, it was a nine-monthlong dance and process, but we ended up closing that deal. Um, and it really literally is like trans like probably fast forwarded Aliana five or 10 years on progress. So basically, Aliana, your company, you Brian bought a unit of Microsoft. Yeah. And you and Warren Buffett do things like that apparently because that's what Warren Buffett does. Walmart, Microsoft, whatever. That's amazing. That's Congratulations on doing such a thing like that. That's a great experience in life. That that Microsoft deal. What made them finally say, "Okay, now we're ready." Was there a reason behind that or they changed? So we actually in the in the interim between when we made our original offer and when they came back to us, we'd struck a deal with AWS, their number one competitor. Yeah. And we started deploying services with AWS. And I think they saw how we were succeeding and how AWS's partnership strategy was more attractive to the market than their strategy of kind of vertically integrating. And so they made a strategic decision that they were going to Yeah. like we're going to we're going to change our go to market strategy. Yeah. And we no longer want to own what they called the network functions business. We want to partner there. And they decided the only way for us to get out of this and truly partner is to sell this vertically integrated solution to the best buyer in the market. And in the very first conversation they had with me, they said, "Brian, um, our number one criteria is taking care of our customers and we want to sell to the entity we can trust." And I came to find out later in the process that part of their diligence on us as the buyer was calling their top five customers and asking them who they wanted to sell the company to. If you know, how interesting is that that they would call their customer be like, "Hey, we're going to sell this. Like, we made a strategic change. Who do you want us to sell it to?" Um, here's a few names we're considering. And every one of them said, "We want it to be Alansa." All five. That's cool. That's amazing, Brian. That's that is amazing. That is really, really good. Two more things to cover and then you can wrap up when you want to, Tyler. Tyler's our host. He's fine for for the greatest moderator in the world. But um two things. So first thing is chips off the table. Okay. Um I said that early on and we have a lot of startup folks watching. So you know that's kind of interesting. What does that mean when I say you finally got chips off the table? What does that mean? Yeah, it means for a long time as an entrepreneur stock your founders shares are locked up inside the company. A lot of us founders for a very long time, we are stock rich and cash poor. So asset rich, cash poor. Yeah. Your stock is worth something, but we're working for discounted salary. Your equity in this company was worth a lot of money, but you couldn't go buy anything. Yeah, totally. Cuz you were you're talking big numbers and you know, you've raised this round, that round, doing big deals, doing that. So So, so taking chips off table, did that happen as a carve out of another investment round or how did you take chips off the table? Yeah, I took a small amount of chips off the table. Like we don't need to say the amount, but the the mechanism. Yeah, the mechanism is we raised a round and we had the opportunity to overs subscribe the round, right? There was more interest in the round than we were targeting turn. When was this round? When was this? This is a year and a half ago. Oh wow. So, a footnote of this podcast episode, just something to write down if you're an entrepreneur, is that at some point in your life cycle, when a round of investments coming in, usually a growth round, there's an opportunity for the founders to finally get liquidity on some of their stock and get some financial comfort in life. And that's called a carve out and taking chips off the table. And you got that opportunity. And and that's and that's the right thing. And it's and why investors want that too to happen is that gives you comfort in life. So you're focused on growing the business, not saying, "Hey, I've gone all these years without liquidity. I need I need to get liquid by them letting you have some liquidity. The pressure is off and you can focus on even growing to the next level." Yeah, absolutely. Like I think I look back and I think like as an investor lesson learned there will come a time in every entrepreneur's journey where taking some liquidity off the table is investor friendly. Yes. Meaning like you you get to a point in the company's evolution where so much of your net worth is locked up inside of this business. And what that causes in some ways is this mentality of I have to protect my downside. Yes. I put so much into this for so long. I don't want to swing for the fences. I'm going to go for a base hit. And what this did for me is it unleashed me at a point in time that was really important. Go for the grand slam. That's what your new investors want you to do. What I tell what I teach in our boot camp is this. I say I take them through the rounds of investment in a normal illustrative uh cadence, right? And I say these first few rounds, they want you to feel like if this thing fails, your whole life goes down the tube because they want you they don't want you liquid. They want you working like crazy to create value. But then there comes a point where you're so far along in the company that they're saying, "No, I'm putting money in the company and I want you to be financially strong enough to not think about you got to take the next lowball deal. I don't have to worry about my kids college education anymore." And you're not going to take a low ball deal that allows that recent investor to only get a modest return. They want to get 10 times their money from your efforts. So, you have to have some financial comfort so that you can say, "Yeah, I'm comfortable and I'll wait for that 10x deal instead of taking a 1.5x deal." Exactly like you said, swinging for the fences. It enables that swing for the fence. That's good. Let's let's let's wrap it up a little bit, but you one last question for me is all of these rounds you've had at Alansza, what is the total dollar amount that you have funded from day one? Can you talk can you say those numbers? I mean if you want just equity or equity and debt. Well, I guess did all the debt get did some debt get paid back or did all the debt get to turn into equity? Like we just um let's see how do I You have a pretty prolific fundraising history. Yeah. Was there any convertible debt that got paid back in cash or did it all go to equity? It all went to equity. So everybody rolled total financing debt and equity. The debt became equity. Like this last transaction we just did buying the company from Microsoft. did a big portion of it in debt. So, skip. Okay. Total equity including convertible debt over 100 million. Okay. And well over 100 million and then you and then you got some debt on top of that. So there. So, uh that brings me to this question because I think a lot of our uh listeners would like me to ask this question and it'd be a fun question. No specifics, but am I going to be happy as an early investor? Oh my gosh, John, you're going to be thrilled. Okay, that's what we like to hear. Especially given like the dark days of when you probably like almost wrote Aliana completely off. Yeah. Now we're going to get No, it's a great It's a great in the trenches. Roll up your sleeve, put your freaking boots on, get to work, and make something happen, right? And don't let the dark days get you down. Like, just keep going. I mean, I've heard some pretty historic stories of one death, but four almost calls to death. That's pretty That's pretty intense. So, awesome stuff. And it's a compliment to Bri Bri. So Brian, like I said, to get the success that you're seeing now is a zigzag. It's not a straight line, right? And also the skill set to be the CEO from the very start to even where you're at right now. Not everybody can pull that off because, you know, I said how incredible you were at pitching your early startup deal and how you got your first funding, all that. But to operate and run the company and get through, you know, having 78 employees, go down to eight because 70 went to this and how you also then built the company back up and now you're at hundreds of employees and all that. And the management skill to have hundreds of employees and all this. I like for me around 80 employees I start not liking companies because it's not as I love it when it's 20 or 40 and then when it gets over a hundred it's just so I tip my hat to you as a startup guy and also as an enterprise business manager. Do you now have a head of HR? Yes. Do you have an in-house legal team? Yes. Yeah. That's that's crazy. You heard me say my signals are the minute we hire an HR director or an in-house counsel, I'm out. Yeah, those are some tough times. No, but it's interesting. So, we have almost 700 employees now. 700. Spread out across 20 different countries. Um, very international and I love it. Like I have so loved getting to know every one of our team. I don't think the listener or viewer could understand the size of what you're doing from your previous timeline. So 700 employees, over 100 million raised. When you pass Aliance headquarters on I-15 going down the Wasetrint to Utah and you see Aliance on that big black building, you know that it started though as a student venture. Y and a young guy who was really good at his game, but still anybody in America can do this if they will put themselves into the game and be honest and play well. Yeah. Do you agree with that statement? I 100% agree with that statement. This is the American dream. Like there's no better nation on earth. There's no better state in our nation to start a business than Utah. And it's just it's such a great place with such a great ecosystem, great resources. But if you're interested, like get in the game. Yeah. I just to close just to bring it all home like I mentored you and brought you through a lot of these processes as one of the guys helping you and all that. It was so fun. And it's I did the same thing with Tyler. It's so fun. It's just so fun to see. Tyler one day called me up and says, "Dad, I can't believe how fast the money's coming into our account and and that's when a business starts taking off and it's cool. I've gone to lunch and with you and you've updated me and sometimes it was things are going bad. Oh, things are going good." And it's just amazing. And so I just No, but it it's a story of patience. Yes. clarity, not getting disrupted by all the down times, and then also just the relentless go to it, get it done attitude cuz like you could have thrown in the towel a ton of times. It's this this game's not for everybody. Yeah. But I believe so many could do it and they just have to believe in themselves and you've been an amazing person watching. I want you to know you're I count you as a friend. Absolutely. But I also and this is somebody that was a onetime mentor views. I look up to you too. Yeah. Thank you, John. That's a so mutual. That's a great way to end it. So, let's end it there. Thank you, Brian, so much for coming on. Tyler, thank you for having me. John, great to be here again. Yeah, you got you're you're the best. And honestly, thank you so much for making time. Follow us, subscribe us. Yeah, of course. I'm going to close out, but we have the CEO of 2025 from Utah Business here. Okay. He came on to our podcast. Thank you. you are leading the way with 700 employees. Thank you for taking the time to come here. So again, thank you so much. Yes, Startup Ignition. Like, comment, subscribe. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much for watching. We are so appreciative of everything that's going on. Our viewership keeps going up and we are so appreciative of every single one of you. So, thank you. This is episode 14. Brian, thank you so much for coming. And we are out. Rock next to Rock.