Interview with Jay Phillips, open source entrepreneur

Friday, December 29, 2006 at 02:27am by David Askaripour in We're Talkin'

Jay Phillips is a young entrepreneur who doesn’t wait for success to find him, he goes out and makes it happen. He saw an opportunity in the VoIP sector and developed Adhearsion, an open-source framework that’s on the verge of revolutionizing the entire telephony industry.

Tell me about Adhearsion. How did you get it started and why?

Necessity is the mother of invention. While working with an Internet telephony service provider in Houston, I found a lot of dismal repetition in our day-to-day jobs, and when our boss would get crazy new ideas to integrate the phone systems with something new, we just squirmed in our seats. This wasn’t just an issue facing our little spot on the map– this was an issue affecting the entire industry.

Adhearsion came about as an experimental solution that my roommate Mike and I wrote in our free time. When the going started getting extremely good, we offered to sell the program to our boss (we were just contractors at the time) and legal issues ensued. We left the company and Codemecca was formed.

What exactly does Adhearsion do? What problems does it solve?

Well, the best way for fellow geeks to understand it is to explain that Adhearsion is a new Application Programmer Interface layer to an entire business, VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) included. The open-source PBX software Asterisk by the fantastic folks at Digium has really revolutionized the Telecom world and it’s this on which Adhearsion builds.

What makes Adhearsion special is that it employs the linguistic, very high-level Ruby programming language, allows refreshingly pain-free database integration, and most importantly I feel is its extension architecture.

Until now actually trading and merging sophisticated VoIP functionality has been a nightmare. Now one file gets put in your Adhearsion folder, Adhearsion finds that file, and suddenly the code in that file works across the entire framework.

This has provisioned the potential for some really awesome features that will come standard with Adhearsion, making a new (and free!) Adhearsion install more powerful than what most companies have spent tens of thousands on.

Despite the fact Adhearsion is in a private beta phase right now, these features to which I’m vaguely referring have already created quite a bit of industry interest.

The best way for our fellow ungeeky better halves to understand Adhearsion is to say that Adhearsion makes programmers and managers really, really happy.

Have you been able to get Adhearsion in the hands of any big players in the VoIP industry? How have you been promoting?

Promoting something that’s not even publicly spoken about has been extremely difficult, albeit absolutely necessary. The first real time that the VoIP industry heard the name Adhearsion was at Astricon 2006 in Dallas. I gave a couple of small demonstrations of the code I had at the time and spread the gospel by word of mouth. Luckily, I managed to bump into just the right individuals.

I came back with a stack of business cards and started pinging around. Most people didn’t want to cut their deck on potential vaporware, so in this way holding the code private until Christmas has been a thorn in my foot. But Mark Spencer, the CEO of Digium, creator of Asterisk and fellow young entrepreneur, was willing to listen.

I sent him the longest email I’ve ever written and caught him on an instant messenger. It was all uphill from there. Mark’s been my angel investor in a non-financial kind of way — he’s an angel investor of his thoughts and opinions.

When Mark speaks, everyone in the industry listens. One quick, tiny mention of something new from his mouth gets thousands of other mouths talking. I’m not sure how much my own mouth should be talking about my business arrangements, but here are a couple of things I have let out.

Some of the biggest open-source VoIP product makers, names which I shouldn’t mention just yet, have sunk their teeth into my work and will officially include Adhearsion in their product when Adhearsion is public. We’re talking thousands of downloads a day in the first week or so

Adhearsion makes it into the wild. I feel this alone will establish a lot of the much-needed respect projects like this need early on. Companies I’ve privately invited are already using Adhearsion and are reporting great success. This too is another necessity: having companies actually using it.

Adhearsion serves as the VoIP integrator for functions ranging from election-related Web 2.0 apps to in-house auto-attendants. O’Reilly Media, the biggest publisher of computer books, has invited me to speak at their Emerging Telephony 2007 conference in San Francisco.

I’ll be giving a ninety-minute workshop there showing how to transform your business with Adhearsion by example of a fictitious new Web 2.0 startup. This conference is one of the biggest events of the year in VoIP, attracting the real “who’s who” list.

Tickets alone range from $1,500 to $1,800, but luckily for me speakers get in for free. Like Astricon, this will be a pivotal point in Codemecca’s life to network and get people talking about Adhearsion.

But to tie this segue back, social networking has been the number one most important root of Adhearsion’s early success. I can’t stress this enough. Be yourself, show passion, be interesting. If you can establish friendships in your industry, life becomes incredibly rewarding both on a business and on a personal level.

What’s it like being a young entrepreneur doing such big things?

On a personal level, there’s been virtually no difference, ironically. When people ask me what my company does, their ears shut off as soon as I mention technology. If I say I’m a software developer, people associate my age with game programming.

If I say phones, they think it’s silly. If I mention I give my code away for free, people immediately doubt my business skills. I gave up a long time ago trying to find someone who cared.

On an academic level, it’s been rough. I’m constantly having to decide “Okay, should I be memorizing trigonometric identities right now or implementing that new feature that saves VoIP companies thousands of dollars.” Often I side with my entrepreneurial obligations and it does hurt.

On a professional level, being young has made all the difference in the world! When these geezers see this passionate youngster talking to them on an eye-to-eye level, it really portrays my sense of direction. In fact, nearly every good contact I have has started with “Wow, so how old are you, kid–”

Your youth is the best time of your life, and I can’t think of anything more fun than what I do now. What’s more, starting young gives you an advantage throughout the rest of your life. An IPO at twenty-one attracts entirely different responses than an IPO at thirty-one.

Any parting words for fellow young entrepreneur?

Constantly think of your own name and what people should think when it comes to their mind. For me, “Jay Phillips” is something I want the entire industry to know. I want the entire industry to know it thirty years from now. Or even a hundred and thirty years from now.

Set your ambitions high and follow through with them. Networking is the cheapest way of doing this and, truthfully, one of the most effective ways.

Take every networking opportunity that arises and don’t be shy. Our Achilles heel is lack of real-world experience and knowledge, so be a voracious reader to compensate. If you can show youth, knowledge, and passion, you’re destined for great things.

Keep in touch with Jay and follow him on his journey to success as a young entrepreneur — visit jicksta.

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