1. http://www.lightreading.com/spit-(service-provider-it)/diameter-routing-signaling/ceo-chat-with-
doug-ranalli-netnumber/a/d-id/713448
CEO Chat With Doug Ranalli, NetNumber
BETWEEN THE CEOS BY STEPHEN SAUNDERS
Page 2: Doug's early days
Page 3: Harvard, and how to develop a business plan
Page 4: Just the fax, man
Page 5: The beginning of NetNumber
Page 6: Solving signaling overload
Page 7: Fat pipes and Google envy
Page 8: A long disruptive game
2/2/2015
G'day! And welcome to an entirely new feature on Light Reading -- our weekly "CEO-to-CEO"
interview.
My name's Steve Saunders, and I'm one of the aforementioned CEOs. Each week I'll be picking one
of my counterparts from around our industry to take part in a Q&A on, well, whatever I jolly well feel
like talking about, really.
Choosing my first victim (ahem, "candidate") wasn't very hard. Of the 200 or so executives who I've
met with since I reacquired Light Reading last year, there was one who really stood out.
Doug Ranalli is founder and chief strategy officer of NetNumber Inc. , a privately held company
based in Lowell, Mass.

2. Doug Ranalli, founder and chief strategy officer of NetNumber: "If the Internet teaches us anything, it teaches us that
speed of innovation is the winner."
NetNumber's mission is to address a huge problem in the telecom industry: the bewildering and
ever-increasing variety of signaling protocols in service provider networks.
Deploying, managing and integrating these protocols is one of the most expensive and complex
challenges faced by network architects today. Yet, surprisingly, there has been very little discussion
of it in the media.
There are two reasons for that:
1. Signaling protocols are really frickin' complicated (see diagram below -- it took me two trips
to Lowell, Mass., to get my head round NetNumber's solution).
2. Incumbent vendors don't have anything to gain from solving the problem. In fact, they make
money from supporting the complexity.

3. Really Frickin' Complicated!
(Source: NetNumber)
As a result, conventional wisdom has it that the existence of the signaling protocol problem is just
something service providers are going to have to live with -- like reality TV, or The Tea Party.
Doug and NetNumber don't agree. In fact, NetNumber's entire raison d'etre is to solve this problem.
And it does so by using a product called TITAN that sits between the OSS/BSS layer and the data
switching layers in telco networks, handling all of the necessary conversions between the different
protocols.
Sounds familiar, right? And if you think this sounds a lot like a router, well, you are correct, sir! That's
basically exactly what NetNumber has built: a multi-signaling protocol router (MSPR). And my money
is on NetNumber's product succeeding for exactly the same reasons that Cisco's multi-protocol
router took off in the early 90s.
So how come we aren't seeing the emergence of a whole slew of MSPR startups? Well, that goes
back to the complexity issue. It has taken NetNumber's development team 15 years (that is NOT a
typo) to get its product to the point where sales are taking off.
That's an extraordinarily committed vision, requiring a truly determined (possibly stubborn?) leader to
execute it. Specifically, it requires a Doug Ranalli.
[Editor's note: The following interview is long. If you don't have time to read the whole thing, just take
what you need, as they say at AA.]

4. The first three pages focus on Doug's background and business development strategy. They contain
"must-read" intel for anyone thinking about launching a startup in the telecom industry (or any
industry for that matter). And as a bonus, there's a really funny anecdote about the world's tallest
telecom equipment rack.
The rest of the interview focuses on the problem that NetNumber is looking to solve, and how it does
so. If you're a network architect, you need to get down with this information. I promise you it's worth
your time to ingest.
I hope you enjoy this new feature. Our next CEO-to-CEO interview is with Jay Samit, CEO of publicly
traded video solutions vendor SeaChange International Inc. (Nasdaq: SEAC). I'll be conducting it
using Internet radio (what could possibly go wrong?) and it takes place on Wednesday, February 4
at 1:00 p.m. EST (10:00 a.m. PT). "Hear" you there, I hope!
Next page: Doug's Early Days
Doug's early days
Steve Saunders, Light Reading: You have an extensive history as an entrepreneur. So where did
it all start for Doug, Doug?
Doug Ranalli, NetNumber: It started in college.
SS: Where?
DR: Cornell.
SS: I've heard of it.
DR: I started a business called Dorm Magazine. Crazy idea. It was effectively an architectural digest
for people living in dorm rooms. You show up to school at that time, four cinderblock walls. Spartan.
You gotta do something to it to make it livable. So I came up with this magazine where people show
up to school and they do interesting things and we document it and tell the stories. And it educates
people, and gives them a human interest story. And the individuals create the content.
SS: So you were crowdsourcing the content for a community-driven publication; basically, you were
40 years ahead of your time.
DR: We didn't have those words back then, but, yes, the idea is everywhere now. And I had a great,
homogeneous audience -- several million college students living in dorms. It took a few years but
eventually I built it up to a circulation of a little over 1 million and then sold it to Time Magazine a
couple years after I graduated.
SS: And how did that go?

5. DR: I achieved my initial financial goal, which was nice. But for me I sold because it was time to
move on. It headed me down the path of life.
SS: But it didn't stop you from working. I mean, I had a takeout as well, when I was 37, and I didn't
stop working, but you had yours when you were what, 23?
DR: Twenty-four, yeah.
SS: What was it that propelled you forward? Was it that you didn't want to be bored or was it that you
just got a taste and wanted more?
DR: It was definitely a case of "I really enjoy this." I liked building things. And if you dig down through
the layers there are subtle issues that drive you as a human being. For me, we moved around a lot
when I was growing up. We moved every two years. So I was always the new kid in school. And you
never fit in. Well, it turns out if you start your own business, you fit in. At some level...
SS: ...it reverses the polarity.
DR: Exactly. You feel totally comfortable. So at some level that probably plays a role in why I like to
start these things.
Next Page: Harvard, and how to develop a business plan
Harvard, and how to develop a business plan
SS: What was next after that?
DR: So next for me was that I wanted to transition into technology. I told you I'd switched to
engineering, and I really enjoyed it. But I'd also always had a desire to get a Master's degree in
business, so I took the chance when I sold the first business to go back and get my MBA. And that's
what moved me to Boston, spending two years at the Harvard Business School. And it was fantastic.
SS: They must've embraced you there. There can't have been too many students there who already
had a deal under their belt by the time they were 24 years old.
DR: Very few.
SS: You learned a lot there?
DR: I did. At Harvard, the way they teach is "case-based" and the more knowledge you bring into it
the more you actually get out of it.
SS: What does "case-based" mean?

6. DR: In their teaching model they don't just give you a book. What they do is they have you read
about a company, a situation that a company's involved in. If it's a marketing class you're reading
about a marketing-related problem. And then they make you analyze it and determine how you
would behave.
SS: So you say, this is what I would've done and then you compare it to what the success story
was?
DR: Right, or failure.
SS: Interesting. It's a bit like that episode of Star Trek where they have the test.
DR: The Kobayashi Maru.
SS: There you go. I always felt that was a great example of how to get ahead in business. If you
can't get it right just...
DR: ...change the rules.
SS: ...change the rules. Bingo! So what came out of that?
DR: So I spent the time in business school researching 17 different ideas. As I said, I'm good at
coming up with them. But I'd learned from my first startup experience that you have to be careful
because once you start down the path of a new business, you're gonna work at it for a bunch of
years.
Harvard ended up writing a case about my approach to research in businesses. I always study two
ideas at a time. My experience is, you can't focus on one idea. You always fall in love with it. You've
only got one idea. It must be beautiful. If you kill it then you've got nothing. So I refuse to research
one idea at a time. You always have to have two. And one has to be better than the other. You can't
do both. So by definition one must be better.
SS: Like the A side and B side of a music single. You have to have contrasts.
DR: Right.
Next page: Just the fax, man
Just the fax, man
SS: Tell me about the next project that grew out of your time at Harvard.
DR: The next one came out right after I graduated. So this now brings us up to 1990.
SS: So we're getting into the era of packet-switched networks.

7. DR: We are. The very early stage of packet-switched networks. And I saw an opportunity where
human beings had started to use the circuit-switched network to do more than make phone calls.
The history [of telecom] was that we had taken a whole bunch of really smart engineers over a long
period of time and had them build a network for voice calls. And we called it the circuit-switched
network or TDM network, right? And it was designed for a single service.
But time went on. Human beings evolved to the point where one service wasn't good enough. They
wanted to do more things. At that stage what they really wanted to do was move documents. And
some smart engineers figured out how to bolt on a device to the phone network in order to move a
document, facsimile. But that applied a lot of creativity inefficiently because you were trying to use a
network for a way it was never intended. So I looked at that inefficiency. I saw that 50% of the
communications traffic between the US and Japan was fax. That's crazy.
SS: It is, yeah.
DR: And at that time the first minute of a call for New York to Tokyo was $3.60. That dropped down
to $1.40. Huge numbers. The world had not deregulated telecom yet. The Internet didn't exist. This
was a different world.
So I saw that inefficiency of a huge amount of traffic that's using the network in the wrong way. I
hired some engineers using money from my first business. And I proved that we could build a
network where we could take a fax phone off the network in New York for 5 cents a minute. We
could put it on a private IP network, move it all the way to Tokyo, fully loaded [for] 5 cents a minute.
SS: So this is "super early IP."
DR: Right.
SS: Using a Cisco single-port router with, what, 10 Mbit/s?
DR: No, no, you bought a T1... 1.5 Mbit/s. Can you believe that?
SS: Wow. And it really was expensive.
DR: Oh, so expensive. And then we get it into Tokyo and then we needed a rack of equipment. This
is a funny story. To rent one rack in this office in Tokyo cost $10,000 a month. So we showed up with
the tallest rack you've ever seen. It was 17' tall.
[General hilarity and laughter]
SS: Oh my god, that is hilarious.
DR: They had not considered that somebody would do that in a 30' tall room.

8. SS: That is too funny.
DR: It really was.
SS: Did they laugh?
DR: I'm sure they must have, but not to us, right? This thing was like the Empire State Building.
SS: That is absolutely brilliant.
DR: And then we put a gargoyle on the top of it. There must be some guys in Tokyo still telling that
story.
SS: That's priceless.
DR: Right? The funny things you do when you're at a startup. Every startup has those kinds of crazy
stories.
SS: Sounds like it was a success.
DR: It was. So the fully loaded cost of moving a minute of fax from New York to Tokyo for us was 15
cents. The market price was $3.60 for the first minute and $1.40 for each additional. So we went out
and said, "We'll charge 75 cents a minute from the start." And you couldn't help but sell customers.
Every customer said yes. So I called 50 customers to test the idea and of course they said, well, if it
works the answer is yes.
And from that point I raised quite a bit of money. Over time, I raised almost $200 million. And we
went from one person to 750 people in five years.
SS: What was the company name?
DR: It was called Fax International.
SS: But how did it all shake out? You must've seen the end coming, right, because there was a
window of opportunity there but it was finite.
DR: We did see the end coming but we couldn't tell how fast it would arrive. I'll put that in context of
NetNumber. Everyone knows that PSTN is gonna come to an end, right? 15 years ago a lot of
people were saying the PSTN's gonna be gone in five years. I remember people saying it. But it's
still here. So people are surprisingly smart about seeing what's coming. But it is impossible to tell
when. And in this case we had several product ideas to extend us beyond fax and we were working
on them patiently. But we were growing like a weed and so it consumed most of our time and
attention.
SS: Of course, yeah.

9. DR: And it just exploded right up until the middle of 1997 and then it stopped. It just stopped.
SS: What killed it?
DR: Three things happened at once. The World Trade Organization decided that if you wanted to be
part of the WTO, you needed to agree to deregulate the telecommunications industry. So that
decision caused prices to drop like a rock.
Then there was a currency crisis in Asia that was really dramatic in the middle of 1997. We had
markets we were in in Indonesia where we had people and the currency dropped 90%. Totally
destroyed the business model.
And the third thing was the Internet. In 1997, email started to explode. And so people just stopped
caring about fax. There was just too much change all at once for us. And at that time I'd lost control.
There were lots of investors and the investors just didn't want to keep going. So we got forced into
shutting it down and selling it off in pieces. So, these things don't always work.
SS: Well, it worked great for a long time. I mean, I'm sure it was a great living.
DR: It was. It was a great living but you'd like all these stories to end beautifully. And they don't
always end beautifully. By the end of 1997 we were in trouble. By early 1999 we knew we had to
stop.
I started selling off the company, and bought up some intellectual property. I bought several patents
and then used those as a foundation for what would become NetNumber.
Next page: The beginning of NetNumber
The beginning of NetNumber
DR: One of the things I learned at Fax International was a deep understanding of how you connect
the TDM network to an IP network, and what the real differences are there.
And one of the things that stood out for me was addressing routing. Completely different for each
network, but the human beings using the networks are isolated from that.
Human beings everywhere in the world were used to dialing a [telephone] number to initiate a
communication. And they'd also been trained that you could do that for a document using a fax
machine. And you could do it for connecting to a dial-up Internet network, which is what AOL did for
us.
So I placed a bet [15 years ago] that human beings were going to need to preserve that experience
of using the phone number to initiate a service. But the IP network has no interest in a phone
number. It has no meaning to it at all.

10. Well, at the time a lot of other people thought, oh, the way this is gonna work is human beings will
stop using phone numbers. As an entrepreneur I said I don't think that's rational; just because
technology changes doesn't mean you're gonna get a billion people to change their behavior. In fact,
it's not even a good idea to try to get them to do that.
So I set about building the tools to allow that asset of a telephone number to work with the routing
infrastructure in the Internet. And that was the impetus behind several patents that I'd filed and also
the impetus for the foundation of NetNumber, which was set up to solve this complex problem
knowing that these two networks were going to coexist for some time. And, even if the old network
died, the old human experience of using those phone numbers wasn't going away.
SS: So how did you develop this as a business case? One of the things that struck me is that the
business case of Fax International could not have been simpler, but now we're getting into some
really complicated and hard to understand technology.
DR: Right. But I didn't like the experience of Fax International's core value disappearance; it felt like
your horse dying from underneath you. So when I started the next business one of the requirements
was that it's got to have a much longer term value proposition -- it's gonna stretch out over 30 or 40
years.
So when I started NetNumber, the whole idea was, I know this is a big problem. I don't know when
carriers are actually gonna realize this is a problem; I can't predict that. But I can bet that it's 100%
sure that addressing and routing is gonna be a lot more complicated in a converged network than
they think it is. And I know that, as an entrepreneur, the only way I can get [my product] accepted is
to build the technology and perfect it way before they need it.
Imagine Verizon wakes up one day and says, "Uh-oh, we've got this problem." They're not gonna
turn to some small group of people in Lowell, Mass., to solve it. They're gonna go to one of their
trusted vendors -- monster infrastructure providers -- and say, solve this problem.
The only way you get in there, as an entrepreneur, is you have to invest beforehand so that when
they encounter the problem you get to say, "I know we're still small but we actually have what you
need. Ericsson doesn't, Nokia doesn't, Huawei doesn't. And I can prove it." And this worked; we
early on succeeded in selling directly to the world's largest carriers... Cingular [now AT&T Mobility],
Comcast, BT, all these huge carriers. And they all bought directly from NetNumber because we
simply had something no other vendor in the market could match. That was our key value.
Next page: Solving signaling overload
Solving signaling overload
SS: Let's dig into some details. Where does your product sit, what's it doing? And if you can
extrapolate that out, how would customers do the same thing if they didn't have your device? I think
that's what everyone needs to understand.

11. DR: OK, so I'm going to use a couple of diagrams.
SS: Good, good. We like diagrams.
DR: So let's start at the high level of where we sit in the network. We do signaling control. Now, in
the signaling control layer of the network, where we sit, up above us we see the OSS and the BSS
layer, right? So the way we interact there is that as subscribers come and go from the network, the
database and OSS systems have to send that data down into the network. Well, doing that turns out
to be extremely expensive. And the more places you have to put the data, the more expensive it
becomes to run your network.
So we provide a single point of contact for OSS to put in any kind of signaling or routing data into the
network that's needed. They can put it into the network in one spot with our solution. Without our
solution, you have to put it in many places.
SS: And have human beings to manage the process...
DR: ...and reconcile inconsistencies, right.
SS: I'm a Tier 1 provider, how many signaling protocols am I using in a typical network?
DR: Lots.
SS: This is a stupid question, but remember you're talking to an idiot, but why are there so many
different signaling protocols out there? Is that a vendor-driven thing or is it just down to the history of

12. telecom, or do they serve different functions? Why isn't there an Ethernet equivalent for the signaling
control layer?
DR: No, no, that's an excellent question. It's an artifact of the way the networks have evolved over
such a long period of time. We started as an industry building the network over 100 years ago. And
the first phase of that evolution was this TDM-based network. And from that we got all those SS7 C7
protocols.
Now, if we'd been in a position where we could've shut off that network as we wanted to evolve,
those protocols would just go away and we'd have simply moved to the next generation. History
shows us that it's just not practical to do that. It's not practical and it's not economical in a lot of
cases. Also, you've got these fixed assets and users are happy. And they don't wanna turn it off. So
you leave that network in place but then time marches on, decades march on, and core technical
capabilities change.
So the truth is that if you're a service provider you want to be able to start over. And so new networks
are built and then you start with that new network and you get a new set of protocols. In this case
you get DDS/SIP.
SS: What a mess.
DR: Two things we do in signaling control -- we ask questions and we allow switches to talk to each
other. You're either routing messages or you're answering questions. And all of these protocols allow
us to do those two things across a set of network systems that evolved over 60 years.
SS: I see, now. So you are coming into this hugely complicated architecture with what is actually the
equivalent of router, a signaling router.
DR: That's exactly what we are.
SS: Is that what you call it?
DR: It's interesting you ask that question. We struggled with the name.
SS: What are you calling it now?
DR: Its product name is Titan. We've struggled with a generic term. So we are in fact a multi-protocol
signaling control platform. But, you know...
SS: Yeah, I see the challenge. We'll have to go back to the thesaurus for this one, Doug.
You know, the telecom industry right now reminds me of a bunch of little kids playing playground
soccer, all just chasing the ball. And at the moment the ball's got NFV or virtualization written on the
side of it. And that's all anybody is talking about, in the media or at events. But at the same time
there are these huge complicated business technology problems to be solved on service provider

13. networks, just like this one, with signaling. And people just aren't talking about them publicly. They're
talking about them with you, I'm sure, and they're talking about them internally. I bet there are a
whole bunch of people inside service providers who've got whiteboards covered in this stuff.
DR: Right. The network architects.
SS: Yes, that's who reads Light Reading.
DR: I wanna go back to the core difference between NetNumber's approach and the rest of the
world.
We touched on the scope of the complexity of signaling control. There are two types of problems:
answering questions, which means accessing data, and routing signal messages. That's signaling
control.
It sounds very simple but, because of the history of networking, it cuts across many different
protocols... SS7/C7, Sigtran, SIP, ENUM, DNS and Diameter. The legacy of signaling control is that
carriers have purchased and deployed standalone systems to solve every single problem in
signaling control. If you wanna do number portability, you deploy a number portability system. If you
wanna do an EIR database* for stolen phones, you buy an EIR system.
And that means you have to buy it from a vendor; you have to deploy it; you have to integrate it into
network management; you have to integrate it into OSS for provisioning; you have to monitor it; you
have to manage its technology lifecycle; you have to upgrade it; you have to scale it and then
eventually you gotta unlock it because the world changes. That's the list.
Every customer understands if you put a system into the network, the cost of living with it will be ten
times the cost of buying it. But all we get to evaluate up front is the cost of buying it even though we
know it's a tiny fraction...
SS: ...the tip of the iceberg.
DR: But the iceberg in this case is multiplied in signaling control because it's the number portability
iceberg, the EIR [equipment identity register] iceberg, the HSS iceberg, the STP iceberg, the
diameter signaling control iceberg.
SS: So that's what these huge carriers are spending all their money on? Staff and management and
human resources and...
DR: It's massive.
SS: Yeah, it is. So you come along with...?
DR: So we came along with a different idea, the idea being we're just gonna do a signaling control
system. We don't care what the protocol is. We don't care what the logic is. We don't care what kind

14. of data you wanna put in. So we approached it totally differently. We're going to do a signaling
control system.
In that signaling control system you have a large scale distributed database. You have many
protocol interfaces. And then you have a logic engine in between. You could put any data in there
that you want, change it any time, talk in any language you want and execute any logic you want.
OK, so if you're a network architect, why should you care? Well, think about what happens every
time a marketing guy at a service provider comes up with a new idea. In a world where you distribute
signaling control across 17 platforms, how do you evolve that idea? Because every new idea is
going to touch four or five of those platforms. How do you possibly align the roadmap of four or five
different vendors just because one marketing guy had a good idea?
You want the marketing guy to have a good idea and you don't want be in a position where you say,
"Look, guy, I just can't do it."
SS: And right now there's too much friction preventing you from doing it.
DR: Yes.
SS: So it's not just about reducing the number of staff and the savings on office. It's actually about
creativity and being a fleet of foot in terms of rolling out new services. It's about...
DR: It's the ability to try stuff. If the Internet teaches us anything, it teaches us that speed of
innovation is the winner.
Saunders: So do network architects internally sell NetNumber's solution to the group [in the service
provider] that wants to make money, or the group that wants to save money? I wonder whether the
network architect starts by talking about savings and then says, "Oh, by the way, this is also gonna
allow us to roll out new services ten times faster." What do you think?
DR: Your instinct's right. It starts when they look at what they can measure today, their costs today.
That's where it starts. So the way we get in is by solving one specific point of pain that someone's
got a budget for fixing.
SS: So you're reducing it to a simple business proposition – back to Fax International at that point
but there's so much more -- so many more layers to it -- so once you get the foot in the door than
you can start doing some things that actually are a bit more interesting.
DR: Much more interesting to the customer.
SS: And helping them eliminate that service provider obsolescence which actually is at the back of
all of these companies' minds, right?
DR: Right.

15. [*The EIR database is an authoritative list of stolen phones managed by the GSM Association as a
service to allow operators to efficiently block stolen handsets from accessing the network.]
Next page: Fat pipes and Google envy
Fat pipes and Google envy
SS: Let's talk about what I call "the fat pipe conundrum," or the fact that 90% of the money that
service providers make is still coming from raw capacity. I ran this event in Iceland last month
[December 2014] where we got 100 C- level types to come. Bizarre, I know. And the good thing was
that once they were there...
DR: ... they couldn't go anywhere else.
SS: Exactly! So we had them for three days, actually talking together, and we had an amazing
discussion about how service providers really need to move and act differently and deliver content-
driven digital services and applications in order to survive.
But then this really weird thing happened. I was talking to someone from an equipment manufacturer
who was there, and he'd had a few beers, and he basically just said "this is all bullshit, these guys
make all their money from fat pipe and that is never going to change." And I thought that was
boggling, that he didn't buy into the vision, at all. What do you think?
DR: I think that if you look at what makes the carrier great -- it's the infrastructure.
SS: Does that get them to the future?
DR: That's a bit of a philosophical question. It makes them incredibly valuable and it guarantees their
survival because that infrastructure has to exist. Google doesn't exist without it. Now, if you are a
service provider, you might well be jealous that Google exists because of it.
SS: Right. Google envy -- that's a great way of putting it, yeah. Let's use the information super
highway as a "for instance." So the tier 1 providers are really the people who built the federal
highway infrastructure. Someone else is building the cars. And unless somebody invents a flying car,
they're always going to have a business there...
DR: ...a really valuable business.
SS: ...which I think is what my friend with a few beers inside him was really trying to say. OK. But
can service providers have it both ways? Can they own infrastructure but also be innovators and
digital mavens?
DR: Yeah, I think that's possible. I think several cable companies have proven that that's possible.
SS: Yeah, some of them have done amazing things.

16. DR: They've done a great job of combining content and infrastructure.
SS: And who would've predicted that?
DR: Right.
Next page: A long disruptive game
A long disruptive game
SS: You've played a long game with the development of NetNumber.
DR: Fifteen years.
SS: Man, that's crazy! That's a really, really, really committed business plan. Aren't you worried that
one of your major competitors, someone with a big lab and a huge R&D budget, is working on an
equivalent signaling control router?
DR: You always wanna ask yourself the question, why do you believe you're doing the right thing
when you're unique, all right? The people that we compete with are huge established equipment
vendors and they have benefitted from the silo approach of every time you talk to them, they sell you
a new system.
SS: Well, they love that.
DR: They benefit from it. And they have product teams and development teams and support teams
dedicated to all 17 of those signaling control platforms or systems. If you're getting paid for it,
where's your incentive to totally change that? You know the answer. There is no incentive.
SS: Right.
DR: And the customers -- many customers today they make the ongoing mistake of believing they're
doing the right thing because they put out an RFP and everybody says, "Hey, I got exactly what you
asked me for." Well, now NetNumber comes along and says, well, of course I can fulfill that function
but I don't wanna sell you a platform for that. I don't wanna sell you just an HSS or a diameter
signaling controller or a proxy. Don't make the mistake of buying that standalone system.
SS: That's incredibly disruptive.
DR: Right. And so if you're already making a lot of money off of the complexity, you don't wanna be
the one to change it.
SS: Absolutely not. It's gonna be very interesting to see how upset you're going to make them, I
think.

17. Good stuff, Doug. Anything else you wanna say for the record? State your name and affiliation? I
guess we did that [laughs at own joke].
DR: One thing I've come to appreciate is that when I started NetNumber I bought those patents and
then I went out and I got $10 million of venture capital financing. And I immediately hired a team of
25 engineers. Well, twenty three of them are still here.
SS: Amazing.
DR: I think it'd be very difficult to find any other place in our industry where there's been a group of
knowledgeable, talented people focused on the same problem consistently for 15 years.
We've actually rebuilt our product completely from scratch four times. So the power of having that
team is not in preserving the lines of code they wrote. The power is in the learning that they gained
such that they know when we need to totally restructure our thinking. That's such a luxury.
With most vendors' products you're stuck with basic code that they've just been bolting things onto.
In the lifecycle of that product they never start from scratch.
SS: Yeah, we call that a layer cake at Light Reading. It's an incredibly inefficient way to code.
DR: It hurts you in performance, it hurts you in documentation, it hurts you in --
SS: -- that there's a finite number of people who can actually make changes to it.
DR: Exactly. So I have quite a bit of faith that knowing the history of what we do no one else is going
to throw 1,000 people at the problem because you realize, hey, that's a great idea and I'm just gonna
do it. I think anyone who tries that is gonna end up with a very complicated thing that might have the
same marketing material as Titan, but isn't gonna have the same functionality.
SS: Cool. Thanks, Doug. I learned a lot today.
DR: You're welcome. I enjoyed it.
Back to the introduction
— Stephen Saunders, Founder and CEO, Light Reading