Ahmed Khattak Transcript
Clint Betts
Thanks so much for coming on the show; you are the founder and CEO of US Mobile. Let's start there; how did you come to be the founder and CEO of US Mobile?
Ahmed Khattak
I grew up in Pakistan; I moved here for my undergrad, and as soon as I landed, I got into all kinds of connectivity issues and couldn't go and activate my line; my parents were waiting for me to give them a callback; this is after 9/11, so a lot of stigmas. Growing up playing so many of these simulation-like games, everything from Zeus to Transport Tycoon to Sims, watching Star Trek where you could just teleport from one place to another place, I feel like I saw the world as a system of microservices, modular, reconfigurable, programmable. And so when I was graduating, I felt like I could re-architect the wireless or the telco side of it because it was so bloated.
Think about it as building a programmable intelligent layer for global access and really fixing wireless connectivity for me was not going to be just launching another wireless network; it was more how do you create something, as I said, which is programmable and configurable and configurable for all kinds of use cases? So I really thought US Mobile. I really thought the industry needed not another prepaid wireless carrier but an intelligent layer on top of these existing networks. And so just this obsession with technology is really what made me start US Mobile.
Clint Betts
Part of the reason why it was difficult to get a cell phone is immigration, social security numbers, all that stuff plays into if you're an American citizen, it's easier, is that right?
Ahmed Khattak
Well, we can very proudly say that used to be the issue before US Mobile came in, but yes.
Clint Betts
That's exactly what you saw.
Ahmed Khattak
Yes. But it was all the above like you go and try to go get a cell phone, they want you to have a social security number, but guess what, you moved to this country, and it takes weeks to get a social security number. My in-laws just recently moved, and it took them eight weeks to get it, so it is a bit of a chicken and an egg situation; it's like, I need this, but for you, you need that, for that, you need this and so all kinds of issues. So, really, the only way to have done it would have been to actually go up to Clint and be like, I know you've been around for a very long time in this country; you really barely know me, but I need a cell phone, so would you be willing to co-sign for me? And imagine how that conversation would go for like nine or 10 people.
Clint Betts
Yeah, weird, that's no fun; that makes no sense as to why it would be tied to that anyway.
Ahmed Khattak
For a country where immigrants have had such a huge role to play, the wireless connectivity space just did not take that into consideration at all. And the more I think about it, my personal opinion is that Americans look at a lot of immigration from a perspective of chain migrations like, I'm here, and I'm going to sponsor my family to come in, so you already have these things taken care of, I'll co-sign for you because you're my family, I'll go help you. I don't think it was made for people like me who just literally had no one in this country whatsoever.
Clint Betts
Right. Yeah, that doesn't make sense even outside of that use case, but you've solved that. So tell us how you did that and how you've built this, and you give your users access to the top three networks like Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile, all of which can work inside of US Mobile, is that right?
Ahmed Khattak
It is. So basically, what US Mobile is, it's the world's most intelligent connectivity platform. We operate on all three networks in the US, and now over 200 carriers globally, all abstracted into that one single defined software layer. So, think about it in some ways as a programmable routing for mobile data, but with AI-driven quality of service baked in; how did we do it? First, the complexity of this whole situation, so one of the things that we do is, since we are on top of all three networks, you could basically buy a plan from US Mobile, like a shared data plan or an unlimited plan, and you can go into that plan and say, I want you to extend this plan to all networks in the US.
So whether that's on the same device where your device makes a decision between what networks to go on or you are deciding, here are the five lines I've activated on my plan; two of them are going to be on Dark Star, one of them is going to be in Warp, and two of them are going to be on Lightspeed, which are three different networks that we have. And so I will use Dark Star because wherever I am, AT&T works really great, but my wife or my kids or my other family members are in cities where Warp is better, and so they'll use that.
These networks don't talk to each other, and even when you go a mile in any city, you will probably be jumping between different kinds of frequencies. When you look at your phone, and it's like going from 4G to LTE to 5G ultra-wideband, that in itself, every time you do that, you're creating new records on just one network. Imagine if you're doing that on every other network, somehow creating that layer of abstraction on top of these networks so you can share that is really what US Mobile is. And I would say it probably took us close to eight years to build this deck and land refined it because a lot of people just didn't think it was possible.
Clint Betts
Did you raise money, or how did you fund the business?
Ahmed Khattak
We originally raised $4 million in seed funding like series A from one of the biggest family offices in the US. In 2021, we bought the family office out and brought in Volition Capital to invest an aggregate of $30 million across our series. A part of it was to buy our original investors out, but that's all that we have ever raised.
When Volition came in, we were closing in on 20 million in revenue; actually, at that time, the company was growing so fast that we went pretty fast between 15 to 20 million in revenue, and so we raised down $30 million. Within four years of that investment, we are closing in on 150 million in revenue, and that's all the money that we've ever had to raise. We are cashflow positive, generating a significant amount of cash at this point while having grown to an extent virally, and so that's all the money that we've ever raised.
Clint Betts
You know how remarkable that is; that is so cool; congratulations, well done.
Ahmed Khattak
It took quite a bit. I would say the general disposition of an entrepreneur or companies that are growing as fast as we are is to go and raise more money, go and get that higher valuation. Every time you're going and raising money at a very high valuation, you basically, whatever that benchmark is, whatever valuation that you raise the money at is the number that you can't sell the company at or exit the company at.
Now, I'm not saying that that's what the motivation of every entrepreneur is. Actually, I rightly saw a lot of entrepreneurs think their companies can be the next Microsoft, Google, Facebook, or Tesla, but let's be honest, there aren't many of them out there. And so it sounds really cool that you raise money from these big investors, but it also takes so much of your business's optionality away. And by the way, it's an extra layer of abstraction even on your cap table; now you have another system that you're reporting to.
Clint Betts
You have a boss, and you have a benchmark that you have to hit at the very least, if not jump over. The fact that you haven't and you understand that is so awesome; it gives you so much flexibility, and you're already profitable. One hundred fifty million in revenue is remarkable; what are we talking about? You don't need to have a raise again if you don't want to; that's pretty incredible.
Ahmed Khattak
We don't, and we hope we never have to. I would say what's going to happen is a bunch of people has been in the company for a very long time, and what we've been doing is, we've been finding them smaller exits just so that they're ready to go and move and could be doing these smaller secondary transactions where a bunch of early employees, we are helping them try to sell their shares and part of it is so that they can go and it is kind of a, now I can go and put a down payment to my house or I'm ready for the next 10 years. So I say a bunch of that's just going to happen until we get to a point where we are maybe public, but I would say it also gives folks that missed out on US Mobile originally to get back or get on our cap table.
Clint Betts
Yeah, that makes sense. Tell me about your customer base. Is it mostly the US? You mentioned you have a lot outside the United States as well; where's your growth coming from?
Ahmed Khattak
US Mobile, as the name states, is just primarily an American connectivity provider. Having said that, the reason that we are getting more and more customers outside the US is that the platform was so modular and so extensible that, at the end of the day, we ended up extending our platform to connect to hundreds of different wireless network operators around the world. But really, that part of the business has been primarily so that if Clint is a US Mobile customer and he's traveling to Spain or to Argentina, we just want to make sure that we give you ubiquitous fast connectivity.
But other than that, US Mobile is primarily in the US; we have customers in every single state in the US. It's a modular platform, so if you want to buy just a couple of hundred megabytes of data to track your pet, you can use US Mobile; if you want to put the connectivity into your car, you can use US Mobile. Or, on the other side of the spectrum, you can buy our unlimited end-game plan, which is basically an unlimited plan that has no limits whatsoever; it doesn't slow down in crowded areas. And by that, what I mean is that you have higher priority data, any network can slow down if it's really busy, and it gives you access to connectivity in a hundred different countries around the world. So basically, like running the whole gamut and basically in that spectrum of modular connectivity, wherever you fit in, that's really US Mobile's business model as opposed to being a senior player or an ethnic player, so it's mostly the US.
How are we acquiring them? I would say more than half of the customers today come through word of mouth; it's just like once you try US Mobile out with our multi-network connectivity and all of that stuff, there are places where coverage is changing from block to block, we give you the ability to jump between these networks even as you're going through these blocks. And then there's just the simple user experience that we have, the connectivity, the transparency, once you actually become a US Mobile customer, as I say, we start living rent-free in your mind, and we don't really see connectivity as a zero-sum game. A, there's not going to be one big winner. The market is like the TAM, which is close to 400 billion a year, and I would say more than half the customers are coming through word of mouth, and the rest of it is through search.
We are probably the biggest carrier on Reddit, which is just super interesting. What happened was that, so US Mobile, obviously it is a tech bay, our product is intelligence that's wrapped in a carrier, anything from multi-network access to zero trust security. And then really what we started doing was, we started to build this connectivity brain, and so I would say it was very attractive to geeks, and so what we started happening was pre-COVID, there was this community of US Mobile geeks that was forming on Reddit, which has become that de facto search engine from products today. And so I'd always be telling my customer service team, say this to that person, and then I was like, well, screw it, I'm going to go and start responding to these customers myself, so I started responding to them.
And then what happened was post-COVID, Reddit became huge in COVID, and people were just on Reddit and TikTok, two of the biggest platforms to come out of COVID. There are other social media platforms out there, Instagram and Snapchat, but these were the two ones that just became huge. So what happened was, I think a lot of the male population in the US ended up going to Reddit to take product advice, and lo and behold, there is this one company on the telco side where they're like, wait, what is this? What is US Mobile? Why is everyone talking about it? Well, everyone's talking about it because it's a great product, but the CEO or the founder responds directly.
And my Reddit relationship has been, I would say, push and pull; it's not a typical corporate relationship where it's going to be, if a customer says something, I'll respond, sometimes kindly, sometimes not, so kind of getting on their level. And that created virality; Reddit is a place where people go to crap on the companies that they use, and all of a sudden, they have a company where they can crap on it, and the CEO is there, or if they don't ... And we were also sourcing a lot of our next-gen product ideas from Reddit as well, and that created virality to the point where this year we are going to cross 25 million views on our subreddit. Every other post of mine, my aggregate posts a month, gets a couple of million views, and all this while Google started indexing Reddit as well. So if you're actually going and looking for the best this plan or best that plan, our results are going to show up on Google, and it turns out social proofing is just one of the most effective ways of marketing your product at this point.
Clint Betts
Yeah, that's incredible, actually. How are you thinking about AI, and how are you integrating it into the product?
Ahmed Khattak
I would say that for us, the way we look at US Mobile from an AI perspective is more on how AI helps you either get served better at US Mobile, make better decisions around your plans, or give you more transparency on really what's going on. So, with US Mobile, we have something called the global search bar, which is a search bar at US Mobile where you can actually give commands. I want to port my phone number out, and it'll basically get you to your port-out information, but the whole point over there was created where you can actually have these natural conversations with our system. So our approach on AI is that it's there if you want to use it, and you'll be able to do really ridiculous stuff like my friend Clint; I've known him for a while; this is what his phone number is; I have his permission, can you please try convincing Clint to come over to US Mobile? And our AI is going to get in touch with you either through emails or text messaging and have that conversation with you.
Or you could say, am I using too much data or too little data? Should I go up or down? Or just having device telematics coming and being like, I live in Dearborn, Michigan, and my service has been very choppy for the last week or so using small language models and large language models to figure out really what's going on with all of our customers in that area for the last month and a half or so. Is there more latency or less latency? Do we have network notifications that come into a data lake and basically parse that and say what that impact is? We look at what your phone is and benchmark it against other phones.
And so we really look at AI from the perspective of, how do we create these experiences for you, better experience? And at the end of the day, it really is made to facilitate our users, so if, at the end of the day, we are training our models to actually say, maybe US Mobile is not the right carrier for you, that conversation is becoming pretty moot at this point because we have all three networks. Like, really, you're going to leave us and go to who? But I really look at AI as a huge force multiplier.
Clint Betts
What does a typical day look like for you?
Ahmed Khattak
It is actually really funny; I was having this conversation with one of my colleagues today. But I'll usually wake up between 6:30 and 7:00 in the morning. I have three kids, and the kids are getting ready to go to school; my wife actually teaches at a preschool, so she's getting ready, so I just get up, make my coffee, and get ready. I usually am from Connecticut to New York, which takes me an hour. I get in at nine o'clock, and the first two hours are usually dedicated to talking to my co-founder and a colleague like Michael and Omar, who's my CFO in our ... and thinking about some top-of-mind stuff.
And then, usually, it'll be a mix of meetings and time for myself. I would say I'm obsessive about having a lot of time for myself in the day just because my general posture is, what are the two or three or four things I can do every quarter that's going to move the needle for the company? So, these tend to be a mix of short-term and long-term goals, and I spend a lot of time thinking about it. I've been recently telling a lot of my colleagues and my friends that the best work that you ever do is when you're not working, so I really try to create that, and then I'll usually be on the train back home between 5:30 to 6:00 o'clock, it takes me an hour to get home, so I'm home between 6:30 to 7:15 or 7:30. I'll work out for 45 minutes to an hour, spend some time with the kids and the wife, and then back at it again.
Clint Betts
That is incredible. So what's it been like to build in the United States in New York, and what is that overall, ever since you got here, what has that experience been like?
Ahmed Khattak
Listen, it's been great. I'm very patriotic about the country for what it's been able to do for me and what I've been able to do for it. And honestly, it's just been a really great journey; for me, America is pretty homogenous when it comes to where you build companies. The reason we built it in New York was because I went to school in Connecticut, we had lots of friends here, and so having that support group around you when you're building companies is just so underrated but so important.
And so, like de facto, like New York became the place where all the talent comes in, it's an absolutely incredible place to hire talent. Obviously, America is just one of the greatest countries in the world to build companies; there's more risk capital in the US than anywhere else out there, so people are ready to take a bet on you. This system is built to, I would say, help you accelerate when you need to, and so I would say from that perspective. Obviously, everything has its own challenges; on the downside, there are lots of monopolies here, which makes it much harder for you to hit escape velocity. That's why so many businesses, like one in every 167 businesses, especially on the recurring revenue side, never make it beyond 10 million in revenue. But that's why we do it, that's the fun in there.
Clint Betts
For sure. Well, that's incredible; what do you read, and what reading recommendations would you have for us?
Ahmed Khattak
I actually read a lot of just stories; I read a lot of biographies, and I absolutely love reading them. Part of it was that one of my majors in college was history, which probably has helped me more in my life and in my startups and my engineering major, which is a lot more technical. Part of it is that history really makes you realize a couple of things philosophically; it makes you realize that if you zoom out on a cosmic level, you're not a very big deal at all, so it really kind of keeps you grounded. It makes you realize that for any given moment, for whatever you're going through, there was someone a couple of thousand years before you who was trying to peddle the same thing to customers.
And so there was an Elon two thousand years back as well who was absolutely innovating around, for example, in the ninth through the 10th century and 11th century, one the biggest advancements in military hardware was these wheels that had axles so they could move faster and they could go over mountains much more easily. And can you imagine that guy must have been like, I made this, and everyone is using it. So it's an acute realization that there's always someone out there who's been through you, so I really enjoy reading a lot of biographical stories. I do read the news a lot; I probably spend two to two and a half hours every day reading articles and news, and if I find an obscure topic that I really like, I'll just get into it.
Outside that, I would say I'm really into sci-fi, and if I can find time somewhere, I'll put an episode of Star Wars on. Even my 4-year-old daughter doesn't watch Disney Junior, but I watched it because there was a specific Star Wars show that was only on Disney Junior, and that's a big way for me to decompress and forget about what's going on around me.
Clint Betts
What have you learned about leadership as a CEO?
Ahmed Khattak
It might seem like a really easy question, but I would say it is a pretty loaded question, which is, for me, leadership is enabling people to do their best work. For me, leadership is, and I think, a lot of people will disagree with this, but leadership is all about being really magnanimous as well; good leadership is not taking all the credit and then really enabling. I would say the best leader in the world is one who is the greatest force multiplier. You really have to go in and look at people around you, and you're like, how do I take this person, and how do I make sure that this person actually goes and hits their potential?
And I am not saying that I am a really great leader, but I'm just saying in my world. Also, a great leader would be someone who is really good at taking someone who's very defensive at the same time, knowing when to attack and knowing when to defend. And I would say leaders are either extremely defensive or extremely offensive as opposed to having that posture in the middle. Like, when are you taking a lot of punches on your chin, and when are you attacking yourself? Early on, we got into this really big litigation, and my last investors told me something that I'll never forget. I was getting really upset; litigation isn't fun; people will say stuff about you that might be true, might not be true, but the whole point is that you throw a bunch of stuff at someone and hope that something sticks. And so it was really upsetting me, and my investors said, listen, Ahmed, you're making a technical defense over here, the person, whatever you're involved in, they don't have any claim against the business or whatever.
And when you are doing a great job making a technical defense, the downside of it is that you can't throw punches because as soon as you start throwing punches, that's when you're in the ring, and then that's when we are going to have an issue. So, for me, it really taught me a lot about leadership from the perspective of when you go and stand back and let things go around you, and then also using the right opportunity to move forward in an aggressive posture as well.
Clint Betts
Right, that's super interesting. Finally, we end every interview with the same question, and that is at CEO.com; we believe the chances one gives are just as important as the chances one takes. When you hear that, who gave you a chance to get you to where you are today?
Ahmed Khattak
Everyone from the person who gave us the first T-Mobile deal to literally my account manager at FedEx, who I actually don't know, her name is Amy, this is 15 years back, our early folks who helped us open our bank account. For me, listen honestly, my whole life is about paying it forward because I have lost count of just how many people have helped me get here. And it's very grounding, and it's a lot, this is so many people, you don't get to where US Mobile today is if people haven't given you chances, everything from your friends to your families, to your colleagues, it probably could be another 45 minutes of me talking.
And it's not lost on me, as a founder, that paying it forward really becomes a very important aspect of your life, so I can't pinpoint one person. And I would say there have just been dozens of people, and it continues, even at scale, even at a hundred million in revenue last year, we added a third network AT&T, and there was just a certain people over there that took a chance on us because we weren't making it easy on them and we were going and asking for all kinds of stuff because we already had these partners. And really, it's those couple of people who are sitting there, and we're like, maybe Ahmed is a cool guy, or maybe the company might get somewhere. So it hasn't even stopped; people are still taking chances on us, and they're still doing us favors, and we are just grabbing them with both our hands.
Clint Betts
That's incredible. Ahmed, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations on everything you built, seriously, it's remarkable what you've built, you should be very proud of that. Thank you for coming on.
Ahmed Khattak
Thank you, Clint; I really appreciate you having us.
Edited for readability.