Taking on the Future of 5G with Serial Entrepreneur Cleve Adams

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. You want tech and tacos? Tacos and tech you know we got tacos and tech is on smash border green guacamole keep accountants counting beans Contador Quentan frijoles found us trying to raise some queso la vida San Diego school of rappy rapping Fire tortillas round jalapenos in these modern times a crappy beer and coffee My coding yoga posse fold the body origami we be surfing coronado eating tacos El gordo, the taco stand in pesto lucha libre and sombrero Got a shout out to cost angels by the ocean Watch the sunset la Hoya shores Entrepreneurs trying to get funded When San Diego Startup Week is popping in the summer Oceanside, the Tijuana esti be full of hustlers from couch surfing to penthouses right on the beach. Tech leaders who who believe stars are within reach we interview and founders who be shooting for the moon. SDTechOS with your host, Neil Bloom. Startups get the party. Startups get the.

Welcome to the Tacos and Tech podcast where we discover cutting edge San Diego technologies and the builders making it happen. I'm your host, Neil Blum, San Diego's tech ambassador, and together you're going to put a face to the name of today's tech leaders with our own blend of local lifestyle.

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party.

Thanks to our friends at Cox Business for being an instrumental resource to our startup and tech community here in San Diego. As a partner in San Diego Startup Week, quick pitch and top tech awards, Cox Business has helped our ecosystem grow into the community it is today.

And welcome back to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Neal Bloom and I am joined by serial entrepreneur and CEO of Voxx, Cleve Adams. Cleve, thanks for being on.

Hey, my pleasure, Neil. Thank you for having me.

Absolutely. I'm excited to get to know all of your wild adventures of building companies, especially in Southern California. Why don't you quickly give us an overview of what Vox Ox is?

Yes, I have built quite a few exciting companies. We can get into that. Well, voxox is a real cool technology company based in San Diego that is a 5G company. That's all that means. All their products are 5G enabled, their software, products and AI. So I call them a 5G. A I company. It's one of the few companies in the world that uses 5G data uses it with artificial intelligence to create a great product for the consumers and for other companies out there. So it's a real cool product and a real cool marketplace that's really fast growing.

Yeah, 5G is the gotta be one of the hottest things and then marry that with AI, which not only is it a hot buzzword, but is real in practice. Now artificial intelligence, we're going to dive into that of what, what that is what you guys are building and what the reception's been. But why don't you take us back a little bit. How did you get into the tech space?

Well, it was a funny story, Neil. I'll tell you that when I got out of college, I followed a girl to Seattle and you know, ended up being a good move on my part because I'm, you know, still married to her. So during the time that I was following her to Seattle and all the adventures between Southern California and the Northwest, I met a guy that got me into technology. And so he said, hey, if you go with me and I'll teach you about tech. So obviously I went in and took that job and learned about the technology place and found out that I was going to be a good guy and the technology, sales and marketing was a good fit for me. I was up in the Northwest for a couple of years, moved back down here in Southern California and took a job right out of college with Texas Instruments. The rest is history. I am a multi time serial entrepreneur and have launched a few great companies and been a part of multiple IPOs and multiple acquisitions. So my career has been a lot of fun.

Great. Did you feel a difference in the technology scene in the Northwest versus Southern California or based at that time it was just all fast paced and fun.

Yeah, well, at that point it was fast paced and fun. You know, kids still in college, you know, when, when I got out of college and moved back to Southern California, that's. I didn't spend too much time in the Northwest. Yeah, no, I felt it was pretty, it was very fast paced and everything was kind of, you know, wild, wild west. And so it was, it was pretty exciting.

So take us through going from an employee at Texas Instruments, which gotta imagine was a pretty big company. What was that like taking the leap into joining and maybe starting early stage or tiny small businesses that would turn into big companies. It's a big difference. You know, obviously going from enterprise to startup.

That's right. So I went to Texas Instruments. I was there for five or six years. You know, they trained Me real well and I was well suited for that company. Met a few guys along the way at ti and the guys that I met went to a little company called Novell. At that time, Novell was a small company based in Utah and you know, networking software. But that was a real rocket ship ride. It taught me that I really liked the startup environment as Novell as, you know, skyrocketed into a multi billion dollar organization. I followed some guys around and we started our own business called Icon International in Irvine and that company sold and I was very excited about that. So I was able to parlay that into a CEO position at a tech startup and the rest is history. I was able to sell that company for a couple of hundred million dollars, then helped start a company called Websense based in San Diego that we took from four guys and a dog and a plastic table to a billion dollar IPO. Eventually the company sold to Raytheon for $2 billion. So not a bad startup. That's how my tech career got started.

Okay, those are some good wins to have under your belt, you know, some good wind under your wings to keep moving forward. We talk a lot about web sense in San Diego. You know, it had a pretty storied history, especially in being one of the basics for cybersecurity. I think a lot of talent came out of there, right?

Yeah. Oh, that's right. Websense was a great company. You know, back in 1996, 1997, when we started Websense, there wasn't much of a. They didn't call cybersecurity cybersecurity at the time. It was just security or network security or Internet security. So, you know, at that time there's only a few companies in the cyberspace and that was Cisco and their Pix. They just bought a Pix firewall and a little company called Checkpoint that was based in Israel. You know, John McAfee and me. That's kind of how it all started out. Websense is one of the first cyber companies out there. We found a little niche that wasn't, you know, antivirus and wasn't a firewall and ran with that. I was able to partner with all the biggest companies in the space like Cisco and Check Point and AT and T and so on and able to, you know, the company was. Turned out pretty well.

Yeah. And I believe, I think maybe there's still even a presence of them in San Diego, which is pretty cool to see that it lives on 20 to 30, 20 to 25 years later, as.

A matter of Fact, it recently it got bought by a private equity firm. It was bought by Raytheon and then recently was bought away from Raytheon. And it's still called forcepoint, which is standalone entity owned by a private equity firm.

Oh, wow. Quite a few hands. That's pretty cool though. And it still lives on. Good legacy to have. Since then, you kind of bounce back and forth between Orange county and San Diego, and I think you're not the only one. A lot of people find it's a really collaborative environment between the two counties. Do you want to touch on that a little bit about working in Orange county, working in San Diego and back and forth?

Well, I kind of live on the border of San Diego county anyway. So I'm in southwest San Clemente and I've been here for 30 plus years, since I got out of college. I chose San Clemente because it was right in between. If you draw, put on a map and you've got Los Angeles to the north and San Diego to the south, you put a pin in a map and it's right and you pin San Clemente, it's right in the middle. So San Clemente has been my home for 30 years and we love it here. But the good part is that, you know, I'm just a few feet from the San Diego county border. Literally, I can walk out of my house, walk a few feet south, and I'm in San Diego county. So we're very close. So I'm actually technically in Orange county, but obviously San Diego county feels like home to me as well. So, yeah, a lot of companies that I've run have been in either Orange county or San Diego.

And do you find similarities in the talent or sometimes you find, I don't know, certain things. You go to OC and other things for San Diego?

No, I don't see it that way. I feel that the talent is pretty blended. You have great universities in San Diego and to the south, and you've got great universities and, you know, in Orange county and the north. So as far as hiring, I find out there's a lot, there's a lot of talent lately in the past six or seven years, I've been focusing on either cybersecurity or artificial intelligence. And I'm finding that there are a lot of security engineers and a lot of AI engineers in this area. So I believe that Orange county and San Diego is a big pool for talent. You know, hopefully we can keep all the, all the great talent here before they move up to Silicon Valley. But I find that has really slowed here lately. This. Especially this year in 2020. Yeah.

I think people are moving back here from Silicon Valley.

Yeah. I think actually they're taking a look at San Francisco and saying, hey, you know, Orange county wasn't so bad, Right?

Yeah. A little bit of a blessing in a rough patch of a year to get people to say, where else could I be? And still do the same job? So I agree. And not just students. Experienced talent, too, which is also great to see.

That's right. That's right. I had very good luck finding the talent that I need right here in south Orange County. When you combine UC Irvine and University of California, San Diego, you really have a good pool of talent. Yeah.

And that powers great companies and a few of them that you've continued to build at some point, or maybe you've been in this for a bit. Take us through kind of the CEO. It seems like you've done a CEO for hire kind of a job a few times. What's that like? How do you become a CEO for hire?

Well, Websense, as you know, was a phenomenal success after Websense did a public offering in March of 2000. That's 20 years ago, if you can believe that. I left a couple of years later and I decided, well, I didn't want to stop working. So what I decided to do is start a firm that would help other entrepreneurs. And I was able to go out and latch up with some great entrepreneurs and help them in their companies. And I had a buddy of mine in Irvine that had a company that needed help. So I stepped in and helped him and put together a pretty good formula for success for, you know, small companies, small businesses. And what I found out is that, you know, revenue is king, Right? Revenue is king for all businesses. And if you can figure out how to Increase your revenue 2x3x4x a year, then you're going to be in a really good spot. But I found out also that everything affects revenue. Everything. Engineering affects revenue, marketing affects revenue, finance affects revenue. So what you need to do is get in and dig deep into all of those areas and really bring forward operational efficiency, which helps revenue. If you can get everybody focused on revenue, then, you know, the engineering is focused, product management guys are focused, finance guys are focused. Sales and marketing are focused on obtaining revenue. And I found out that if you can do that, then everything else fixes itself. It's kind of like a sports car. I got eight cylinders in my sports car. That's eight departments of your company. If one of them is miss one of the cylinders is misfire and it doesn't run very good. So what I like to do is go into every compartment or every department of a company and tune it up and then next thing you know, your sports car is running great. And that's how I like to look at it.

That's good analogy and thanks for breaking it down for us like that. So obviously that works for you because you've shown success. And so what got the eye of Vox Ox for you to get involved and help out there?

Well, a long time ago I started helping people and their companies, you know, focus on revenue and started getting hired by some of the largest private equity firms out there like Bloomberg Capital and Morgan Stanley and so on to help with their portfolio companies. With that, I landed in a few, you know, great CEO roles with small businesses to help them grow. And most of the time I was brought on board to help make the startup look better so they could sell the company. So I've been able to do that quite a few times. Vox Ox is another area where I found out about the technology the company had that they had founders that were still there at the company. Even though the company was 14 years old, they had great success. And then it kind of ebbed and went up and down. And I said, you know, I can help these guys. These guys have a great technology. What they're not doing is they're not taking advantage of the markets that they're in. And I took a look at this huge market, which is a $17 trillion market called 5G. You can't turn on the television these days without seeing T Mobile or AT&T or Verizon touting their 5G networks. There's not an Apple commercial or a Samsung commercial out there that doesn't tout their 5G phones. That's a great market. So I wanted to make sure that the products that Vox OX had worked with the 5G market and they did. So I decided that, you know, it's going to be a great project to get into Vox and help them hit their revenue goals and make it very exciting company. Now they're a 5G enabled or a 5G ready company. When you have a telecommunications software company, you collect over the years, you collect a lot of data, a lot of important data. By collecting that important data, you have a great platform for artificial intelligence. If you can apply machine learning algorithms to all of the data that you collect, then you can make predictions and make projections and say, hey, if Mr. Customer, Mr. Consumer businessman, if you do this this and this, you could increase Your revenue by 10%. There are other people in your geography and in your vertical market that are doing these small things to their marketing campaigns, enable you to make more money. So I can come up with projections and predictions using artificial intelligence to help the small businessman. It's a great small business initiative, and that's what I put together at Fox Ox.

That's great. Can you dive a little bit deeper into the 5G piece? You know, we're seeing it everywhere. We're understanding that it'll be, you know, faster speeds with our phones, be able to watch more video, take us through a little bit about what kind of the power of 5G is going to offer and how and where specifically you guys are playing. I understand the data piece and understanding your data, but dive in a little bit deeper on the technology side.

Well, you know, I'm not a 5G expert, so if we needed to dig in deep on 5G, we'd have to. I'd have to bring somebody else. But just real quick, the 5G is, you know, basically is a data transfer mechanism that allows data to go 25 to 50 times faster. So that's why watching videos and doing things on your phone is going to be that much easier using 5G, just data flows faster. So I wanted to make sure that the products that Vox Ox had would be able to collect the data at those fast rates and be able to scale at the 5G rates. If I, if my data is coming 50 times faster than it was with 4G, then I better be ready and I better have the hardware and the software that enables that technology to run its best. That means they're able to collect data up to 50 times, maybe even up to 100 times faster than they can today if they use 5G. It's all about the data. Now, we know that, Neil, you've seen a lot of data companies out there. The data is where it's at. I mean, data is going to rule the world. I mean, it's got. You need the data to make reporting for your systems to do analysis, to be better, to do predictions and projections. It's all about the data. So I'm glad the 5G era has kicked off and enables companies like us to take advantage of that 5G technology to collect the data and then present the data in a way that will make the small businessman a better way of doing business. Got it.

Okay, thanks for that. So 5G obviously is getting into mass adoption. Like you said, all the devices coming out now and the network's catching up. What does that look like for you guys? What does growth look like over the next few years? Are you hiring a ton right now or take us through that?

Well, we have plans for 2021 to hire quite a few people. The reason is, is because now with our 5G AI enablement product, we're landing a lot of large customers. We have contracts with some of the largest telecommunications companies in the world. So even one telecom company we are partnered with has approximately 400 million subscribers. So if you can imagine, they have more subscribers than the United States has people. So if just 1% or 2% of their subscribers decide to use the Vox Ox product, well, that's a massive amount of revenue. So I see incredible revenue growth in the company in the next two to three years. And once 2021 kicks off and some of these very large telecommunications companies start using our technology, I believe the profit sharing that we put together with them is going to be massive. Therefore, the revenue in the company and the profits in the company will go through the roof.

That's great. Any other pieces or nuggets you can tell us about how every day either business owners or tech workers can start kind of getting engaged with their 5G data and other things like that, like give us some tips about what to look for, how to take advantage of what's coming.

Well, yeah, so Vox Ox really focuses on the small businessman. And they want to be able to give the small businessman man a cloud communications platform. So by doing that, the business, small businessman is able to reach easier, reach out to his or her customers. And in doing that, they've put together a marketing plan where it can be voice marketing or it can be text marketing, where I'm able to reach out to my customers. Let's say if I own a retail store and I have a thousand customers and I'm going to have a sale, I need a way to go out and tell them about that. So we put together a really good text marketing product called Text Me In. We also have a very good voice product called Cloud Phone. So when you combine something like cloudphone and Text Me in or Text Marketing, you have a very good tool to do, you know, marketing campaigns to your customers. Then when you throw in artificial intelligence to their marketing campaigns, I'm going to be able to analyze and monitor the basic statistics of their text marketing campaigns. Then I'm going to be able to analyze and monitor the responses to their text campaigns, and then I'm going to discover the most or the least efficient phrases in their text blast. So they can get better at doing what they do and help them. So you can see by just analyzing what they're doing and the words they're using and the phrases they're using, I'm going to be able to give them feedback and say, hey, if you do this, you're going to get more people opening your marketing and you're going to get more business. And then I can put together artificial intelligence algorithms that will optimize the SMS delivery time and you know, kind of a texting score, if you will, efficiency score. You know, how good is your text, how many people are opening it? So it's really going to give me a leg up on anybody in the space where I can put together these types of reports and these types of algorithms that gives a small business owner, you know, a better chance. So I'm really excited about the work that Voxox is doing and not only their 5G enabled products, but their AI enabled products.

And that's so timely right now, especially with small businesses getting so hit during COVID Right. Finding having to find new digital ways to get to the customer as opposed to just walking off the street. So another whole area to be able to take advantage of and help our businesses.

Yeah, we think it's an incredible opportunity and we're trying to help the small business and we believe that our platform is a perfect solution for the small businessman that needs to get out and communicate with his customers better and more often. And so we have that capability today to do that.

That's fantastic. We're excited that another great company being able to not just grow off of international trends worldwide, but also help our local business as well too. So that's great to hear.

Yeah, we have a team of guys that are selling into domestic into the US and then we have a team of guys that sell international. So that's some of the largest customers that I mentioned earlier are international customers that are looking to adopt our technology for that reason. You know, how to communicate with the small to medium businessman. The small to medium businessman needs ways to do this as well. It's not just a big enterprise play, but, you know, if I can help the local realtor with 10 realtors in his office or the local retail store with, you know, a thousand customers on their database, or if I can help any small business be able to communicate with their customers better and more efficiently, then that's a big win.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, we're excited for voxhox. Congrats on the growth so far and we're excited, We're Rooting for you. You've been in the community 30 years plus you said a few things. We share an alma mater with Pepperdine. Got my MBA there and I know that you help give them advice after you serving. I think maybe you got an MBA there as well too.

I did, yeah. So great. So we're two smart guys. I went and got an mba, actually the PKE MBA from Pepperdine, if you know what that one is, that's the one where they have to have 15 years of executive management experience. And so I went back to Pepperdine and got that mba, which is great. And then I reach out to, you know, fellow Pepperdineers, I just call them Pepper Diners. Right. See if I can help them and their businesses. So that's, that's kind of one thing that I do as well.

That's great. Very cool. Well, it's great to share that with you. The other thing people want to know is, you know, you've been here, you've been here a bit, you've seen some tacos, but where is your go to? You got a favorite?

You know, that's a great question, Neal. As a matter of fact, I do have a favorite. There's a real small hole in the wall in Laguna Hills, California called Flamingos and they have the best tacos that I've ever had. So yes, there are a lot of taco places out there but the one small place that I like is called Flamingos.

Love that everyone has a go to. At first you think, oh there's so many good ones, but then we all zero in, we've got our spot. So Flamingos, good one. We will add it to our list. Well, Cleve, thanks again so much for being on sharing not just about Vox, but some of your management principles and your wisdom. We appreciate it and we're really excited for your guys growth. So thank you.

Thank you, Neil. Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it and I owe you a cup of coffee.

All right. Or a taco.

We'll do it. Flamingos or tacos. Even better. Right?

Thanks, Clay.

All right, thanks so much.

Thanks for joining us on the Tacos and Tech podcast with Neil Bloom. Thanks again to Cox Business for helping make this possible by expanding the reach of the San Diego tech ecosystem. Big shout out to School of Rap for our rad intro music. And thanks as well to Nest Podcast Network where we are recording live inside their studio at Ness Co working in Bankers Hill. You can find Neil Bloom on Twitter eelbloom as well as fresh brewed tech and tacos. In tech pod on Twitter, too.

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