SignalWire Founder and CEO on Transforming Telecommunications for the Next Generation

Product leaders are category creators and world changers. For example, the world of telecommunications used to require a lot of physical dedicated equipment with a lack of flexibility. How did this industry change into the powerhouse it has become today? SignalWire founder and CEO Anthony Minessale shares how telecommunications turned into a software platform, the role it played in remote work, and what to expect for the next generation.

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Anthony saw the issue with being tied to a physical location when it came to telecommunications, and he was confident this infrastructure could be transformed. He soon realized some other problems along the way, despite its versatility, and with some work and dedication, it did indeed transform a whole sector.

“The original problem that started everything was that there was no way to do telecommunications, that physical dedicated equipment that was really expensive. You used to have to go and get like Cisco equipment or BroadSoft, or some kind of switch or set up infrastructure and a data center. There was no real flexibility there; you could get a phone circuit and you can make phone calls with it, but you can’t really tie it to anything else. So I spent a lot of time working on transforming some of those things to software by making a software platform that could communicate using the different protocols that were starting to emerge for real-time communication, voice over IP, and those kinds of things. The idea was to convert that to software so that it is much more malleable and easier to build things out. 

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