Bren:Alumni

The Bren School Alumni Chapter is proud of our alumni, and we are pleased to showcase their activities in these “Alumni Spotlights”. To suggest a spotlight please contact Eric Kowalik.

The CallFire.com team (l to r) Punit Shah, Dinesh Ravishanker, Komnieve Singh, TJ Thinakaran and Vijesh Mehta take a break from a busy day in their Los Angeles office.

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Integrating a 100 year-old medium – the telephone, with a 30-year old medium – the Internet, rekindled the friendship of four Bren School of ICS alumni and led to the creation of a company that, with fewer than six full-time employees is on track to attain several million dollars in revenue in 2008.

“CallFire.com blossomed from both inspiration and necessity,” says Dinesh Ravishanker, co-founder of CallFire.com.

Working as an independent software consultants in 2004, Ravishanker, Vijesh Mehta, and Komnieve Singh landed several consulting projects that required the use of VOIP technology, which uses the Internet Protocol (IP) to transmit voice over an IP network. The success of this project led him to landing a succession of VOIP related contracts.

Several service and custom application contracts later the team decided it was time to focus on building a product that could handle the recurring issues he was seeing on the various VOIP projects he had been working on, and CallFire.com was born.

Ravishanker and Mehta, however, quickly realized they would need help, and they knew the best people to ask were their old friends from days as an undergraduates in the Bren School of ICS.

FORGING A FELLOWSHIP

The founding partners came together in a way that showcased the tight network that the UC Irvine and Bren School of ICS community fosters.

Ravishanker and Punit Shah both lived in Middle Earth and shared the same friends, including Mehta, whom Ravishanker had meet before coming to UC Irvine. TJ Thinakaran and Mehta were TAs for ICS 21, which Shah happened to be taking at the time.

The group credits the classes and friends they made during their time at UC Irvine for giving them the skills they needed to succeed as entrepreneurs.

“During ICS 125, I had an opportunity to work for Compaq. It was my first consulting project for a large company,” says Shah. “It was enlightening to see just how challenging it could be. Truth be told, I think I just figured it all out, as I went along meeting project milestones. I loved it.”

Thinakaran took a wide variety of courses that helped broaden his horizons, but credits ICS 125 for introducing him to the rigors of product development, Philosophy 105A for imbibing the discipline of problem solving, and Technical Writing, which showed him the unique nature of technical communication.

The foursome’s friendship grew during their time at UC Irvine and after graduation Ravishanker, Shah and Mehta tried their hand at some early unsuccessful startups, leading the three friends to go their separate ways and attend graduate school.

Shah and the others learned from the experience and the lessons from their initial failure helped them when it was time to start CallFire.com

“CallFire.com was built after lots of experience in failures and successes,” Shah now says. “If there was one silver bullet in creating a company, I would have to say it is execution. If you want to start a company you’ll need a team that can execute a plan with efficiency.”

In 2005, the team began building and architecting what is now CallFire.com. By early 2006 CallFire.com beta was made public, and has grown aggressively ever since.

Mehta left Xerox, Shah took a leave from graduate work at Harvard University, and Thinakaran left IBM.

“Working for IBM was tough and exhilarating, however, after a while the challenge wore off,” says Thinakaran, who also earned his Masters in Computer Science from the Bren School’s part-time program. “It was like doing the same gym exercise, just with incremental weights. Working for a startup, on the other hand, is like going through boot camp – it’s sensory overload!”

SWEAT CAPITAL PAYS DIVIDENDS

The group pitched Angel investment groups and venture capital firms, but ended up going forward with no seed capital. The team was able to fully fund the venture using residual profits from existing consulting projects.

“CallFire.com became very profitable all without angel investment,” says Shah. “There were times funding would have made things easier, but we didn’t need it. By keeping operating costs low and biting the bullet as our own investors, we are now in a great position as owners of CallFire.com.”

The company had a simple mantra for its product: Make it innovative, easy to use, and provide a great customer experience.

After lots of sweat capital, the team launched CallFire.com in May 2006, a web service that allows users to send out voice broadcasts to large groups (in some cases hundreds of thousands) in minutes, or can have a distributed call center anywhere in the world work in unison as one office.

In addition to the companies Ravishanker had already worked with as a consultant, some of the first CallFire.com clients were other UC Irvine alumni.

GimmeGrub.com, a startup founded by former Bren School of ICS student Emad Farraj, utilizes CallFire.com’s voice broadcast solution to notify customers of new orders and pickup times. In fact, the group still networks with many Bren School of ICS and Merage School alumni.

FRUITS OF THEIR LABOR

The company currently has over 6,000 accounts and is on track to achieve several million dollars in revenue by the end of 2008, but the team isn’t ready to breathe easy just yet.

“I don’t think we’ve quite made it yet,” opines Thinakaran, “we all put in long hours and weekends always pushing ourselves and each other. Whenever we achieve a milestone, we’ll pat ourselves on the back for maybe half a day, but then get right back to work on the next thing on the plate. CallFire.com is an obsession for us.”

They know the price of perpetual success is eternal vigilance, but they can still revel in the initial success the company has had.

“There really wasn’t a defining moment of success. The closet thing would be an overall feeling of financial stability in late 2007,” says Ravishanker. “The more regular clients we had, the easier it was to sleep at night.”

The financial fruit of the team’s labor is starting to ripen, but the work has pushed them to achieve much more.

Thinakaran encourages Bren Schol of ICS majors to “push yourself, mentally, emotionally, and physically; this act of pushing yourself to learn and contribute will go a long way in achieving personal and professional success.”