James Kubik Transcript
Clint Betts
James, thanks so much for coming on the show. Tell us about Somewear Labs, how you became CEO, and what drove you to this industry in particular.
James Kubik
Our mission at Somewear is to save lives by enabling critical communications for some of the most important organizations in the world. And so, the way that we do that is we build a resilient communications platform. So what you can imagine is, we build software both for a command center. So imagine a big room, big screen; you see where your team is and what's going on. But also, we build software for the people that are in the field, the teams that are forward-deployed that are really doing the hard work on the ground.
And what's unique about our mobile side of the house is that our customers are going into places where typical LTE broadband networks just don't work. And so we also build hardware that we call network enablers.
One of those examples is our Somewear Hotspot, which is a four-ounce satellite hotspot that enables bi-directional communications anywhere in the world.
And then we have a new product called Node, which is a multi-network device that essentially also enables bi-directional SATCOM anywhere in the world, but it also brings in a local mesh radio network. Now, the reason that's important is it allows a team to have very efficient communications in the field while also having seamless capability back to command and control.
Clint Betts
How did you get into this industry? How did you even realize that this was something that was needed?
James Kubik
Yeah. It's an unfortunate beginning for us. I lost a friend at a sailing accident when I was younger, and it's one of those events that you hope doesn't happen. But my friend was out with her dad and her younger sister on Lake Michigan, and they somehow were separated from the boat. They did not make it back. And when the boat washed up on shore, it had all the right communication solutions that you would assume they should have. But the realization for me was the EPIRB, which is a marine-grade SOS device, was strapped to the side of the boat, so it was not accessible in that moment of emergency. And the marine radios were stored below deck.
And so, for me, I was an engineering student at Northwestern, and I just kept thinking about this issue, and kept thinking about this event, and that the solutions that existed just weren't accessible in that moment, and so they did no good.
So, I started working on this as a college student just as a passion project. Worked on it for about a year and a half in college, and then eventually realized I had to become a professional and get a job. And so I put it on the shelf for a number of years. I moved out to Silicon Valley. I was working in the technology industry, had another herring event up in northern California that sparked re-looking at this market, this product set, and I really hadn't seen evolution. And so, for me, it was an opportunity to jump back in there and pick it back off the shelf and really go all the way. So that's how we got into this. And from there, I will say, we thought this was going to be a consumer business because of that origin, because of where we started. When we launched, it was all about the consumer marketplace, supporting outdoor recreationists, supporting sailors, backpackers.
I'm a huge outdoorsman myself, and so I knew that market, I knew that industry. I was excited about it, and we were growing. But then, we started hearing from the other side of the market pretty soon after we launched the product. So the search and firefighting providers, people in areas like forestry, Wildland Firefighter Day, I'm saying, "Hey, it's great that consumers are going to have this technology, but I'm out there every day trying to manage a team. These guys are out there maybe three times a year." And it really opened our eyes to the gap in that market and the impact that we could make by supporting teams at scale.
I also had a somewhat harrowing email from @HomelandSecurity.gov email address. The first line was something like, "Hey, we've been following you." And I'm like, what did I do? But no, they were following the company and it opened our eyes that it wasn't just commercial organizations, it was also our federal government, our military, that had massive communication gaps that what we were building really could enable.
So that's how we got to where we are now.
Clint Betts
So how does this technology work, exactly? 'Cause, like you said, with the Node, the one you just launched, it's a mesh radio, but also it has satellite connectivity and satellite technology in it. How does that work, exactly? What makes that stand out so much?
James Kubik
Yeah. So, we built something that we call smart routing. And smart routing is a logic that essentially takes all of the onus off of the operator. So our software is thinking about what is the best way that data should be sent or received, and so on every single transaction that someone's going to do on a mobile application, our software will look at that and say, "You know what? This is the most efficient path to take this pathway."
So, if you take the example with Node, and let's say you have a customer that is using a phone that has traditional LTE. They also have a mesh network. They also have SAPCOM. Looks like those three modalities, and for anything that that operator is doing, we can use one of those three modalities, and we can be changing that up on every second, every transaction, whatever it might be. And so it's an extremely efficient network where you don't have to be thinking about, "Oh, I need to switch to radio B because I'm out of range of radio A." We do all of that for you.
Clint Betts
How do you decide what to focus on as the CEO of this company? I imagine this technology can be used in all sorts of places. Like you just mentioned, it started out as outdoors, and it still is used for that. I believe I saw on your website you still sell to people who go out, which is great 'cause I find myself lost in the mountains sometimes, so I should get one of these. But how did you decide, and how do you continue to decide, where to put your areas of focus, what industries to focus on?
James Kubik
Absolutely. So I think it's the confluence of what is the market need, what is the market opportunity, that that age-old discussion of where do you truly have product market fit? But one additional lens that we put on this, or that I put on this specifically, is where can we make the most impact? At the end of the day, as I mentioned at the beginning, we really are a mission-driven company. And that impact of saving lives by enabling critical communications, it has to be present in what we're doing and what we're focusing.
So, looking at even consumer versus the enterprise opportunity, when we support a search and rescue team, they're effectively going and saving countless lives rather than having a single individual that rarely is in a truly perilous situation. And so what we've found is that we're actually making more impact against our mission if we support the team. It's almost a point of leverage for us where we can make more impact by focusing on those types of teams.
A great example of this specifically, we support all of the National Guard Rescue squadrons within the US. So the Air Force rescue squadrons that are called out for really extreme search and rescue, one of the teams is up in Alaska, and they actually do more rescues than any other rescue organization in the nation, and I would guess the world, but I don't have that statistic. But I know the nation. And, for instance, in the last nine months, they've done over 90 rescues using our platform, which is just an astounding number of-
Clint Betts
Wow.
James Kubik
... really extreme rescue situations. And so that's just something that you don't see as much in the consumer side, and it's much more aligned with our mission.
Clint Betts
Wow. That's great. How do you, as CEO, decide where to spend your time each day?
James Kubik
Yeah, great, great question. It really has changed over the years. I mean, at the beginning of the company, I'm a product guy by trade, and so at the beginning of the company I was laser-focused, making sure that we were building the best product that we possibly could. But, as CEO, that quickly transitioned into building the go-to-market engine and building the real sales muscle for the business.
Now we're at a point where I would say, still, my top focus is always our customers and our enabling our team. So, at the end of the day, making sure our customers are happy and that we're growing the business is what I'm here to do. But now, I'm also very, very focused on how do we bring on incredible talent that can continue to grow this business, agnostic of me. I'm trying every day to work myself out of some element of my job. And you do that by bringing on incredible people to the team.
Clint Betts
What about artificial intelligence? I wonder how that factors in here or if it factors in at all, given what you're doing?
James Kubik
It does, absolutely. So we actually have a number of different places where there's an intersection with what we do in AI. I'm going to speak to a very, very specific one that might be a bit more niche than you typically hear, but one of the challenges that we saw in a broad market space of technology going into the spheres that we play in, is that there was so much bandwidth usage. There was such a massive consumption of bandwidth, and everyone wanted full-motion video. They want to see what's going on. Everyone wants to be streaming something. But you go into an environment where typical broadband fails, streaming is out of the question. You might not even be able to get out a text message. That's where we operate. And so there was this massive juxtaposition of people's expectations with what was possible in these really austere environments.
AI has changed this a bit because, with AI, you can actually have... But with the right compute in different places and strategic places, you can start to offload a lot of those bandwidth requirements and be passing very small amounts of data, but doing processing or doing some level of inference or whatever it might be at the edge or back at a data center, or wherever it might be. And that creates the ability for lower bandwidth transport to really shine. And so, I actually see AI and what we're doing as a beautiful marriage where we can provide really unique and powerful insights to an incredibly austere edge environment because of the ability for AI to run in different places.
Clint Betts
How do you think about self-leadership and staying motivated, and how do you... I guess, in a lot of ways, what I'm asking there is, what's your daily routine like?
James Kubik
Yeah, absolutely. So I'll answer this in two parts. First, my perspective of self-leadership is really that you can't just be a hard worker or whatever it might be. It's about the willingness to really be an equal part of the team and not just work really hard at whatever it is that you're doing but also take up the unglamorous work and do it with a smile on your face. I sometimes joke that we're always looking for the full-stack engineer or the first full-stack person for a startup. And well, I have to be the full-stack CEO, right?
Clint Betts
Mm-hmm.
James Kubik
So yes, some days, I'm going to be the face of the company getting some glory, but I'm also going to be the one taking out the trash, and no one is seeing some of those battles. And so I do think that it's very important to see yourself as an equal member of the team and be willing to pick up some unglamorous work that no one else wants to pick up.
But that also translates to the day-to-day, where my day-to-day is extremely variable. I travel almost every week. And so when you're traveling to different places, and there's no consistent location that you're going, it's really difficult to build a consistent routine. And so, at the end of the day, I have principles that run my weeks. One is customers, and the second is the team. And not necessarily in that order. I mean, they're kind of an equal playing field, but if I'm spending my time either supporting our customers or supporting our team, then I'm doing the right thing. And so that means that the days are lots of meetings, whether onsite or not, and that means that I need to carve out time either early in the morning or late at night where I can do more of that strategic thinking and more of that strategic work or product work because the days are dedicated really to the customers.
Clint Betts
How have you managed culture within your organization? And something maybe to think about is how you've handled work from home versus hybrid versus in-office, as every CEO and leader has had to do since the pandemic. How do you handle culture, and where did you land on the hybrid versus all in-person versus all remote?
James Kubik
So, we are a hybrid culture and hybrid workforce. We have our main headquarters in San Francisco, that's where we started the company. We have a, call it HQ 2, in Chicago, which has been really nice to be centrally located between the East Coast and the West Coast as we have customers on both sides of the house.
And one of the main reasons that we have physical locations is because we also have physical products. So when you think about the product elements of what we do, testing a team solution, you've got to be together with a team. So that's something that has become a requirement where there has to be moments where we're all together. The way that we've thought about it a little bit more abstracted just to our business, but in general, is that when you're doing the generative- creative- ideation-type work, it is so valuable to be in person and to be with people.
That doesn't necessarily mean that you all have to be in the office all the time, but in those moments of generation, creation, ideation, strategy, it's so beneficial to be together that we actually fly our team... We're across 12 states right now in terms of employees... We'll fly people into San Francisco or Chicago, and we'll do a two-day working session or a three-day working session. And we find that those two or three days can be the most productive from a generative work perspective compared to the rest of the month. But the rest of the month, if we do those days right, it's more about execution. So when you're in the execution mode, remote works phenomenally because it allows our employees to have the focus that they need to really execute against that strategy or new development.
Clint Betts
What do you read? What reading recommendations would you have for us?
James Kubik
Yeah. I am a voracious reader of odd content, is how I'll frame it where, yes, I have some books behind me and whatnot, but more often than not, I am just consuming tons of digital media. And so whether it is various substacks for the niches that we operate in... For instance, we're getting into wildfire season, and so there's lots of content out there from public safety agencies or operators that are learning from those experiences. And I just try to envelop myself in whatever kind of niche we're working within. So, tons of substacks, tons of blog-type content, tons of podcasts. I know you didn't ask about listening, but I'm going to include those in terms of just digital media.
And then, oddly enough, I spend quite a lot of time going through different product websites and just understanding what are the product offerings from a certain industry or a certain space. And I think that really diving deep into product that's just out there for you to consume is a really valuable way to understand how trends are changing and markets are changing.
Clint Betts
How do you define your values as a company? What are your company's values?
James Kubik
We have three. And at the very beginning of the company... So my co-founder, Alan, we started the business together, and before we made our first hire, we said we have to set real values that will start to actually build a culture over time. If we need to iterate on them, fantastic. But let's do our best shot. And so, we have three. The first is Default to Action. The second is Be Aggressively Curious. And the third is Experience Above All. And we chose these for very specific reasons.
Default to Action came from some more negative experiences we had in larger corporations where we found some of our colleagues would feel stuck, and they weren't empowered to really make a decision that was already well researched that they knew they were the best person to make the decision, but they didn't feel empowered to do it. And we wanted to make sure our culture did not have that, those roadblocks in it.
The second, Be Aggressively Curious, was really about continual evolution, continual iteration of the people in your business and the business itself. And so we encourage people to go deep into new subjects and learn new things 'cause if they're growing in that way, it's going to benefit the business.
And the third, Experience Above All, is really commenting on how, at the end of the day, the way that a customer feels engaging with your company and product set, is the only thing that matters. And so we want that to be a thread throughout the culture, throughout the company, where it's not just does the product function the way it should, but it is, "What was that experience like when you called into support? What was the experience like when you went to the website for the first time or when you met someone at a trade show?" All those touch points are the business, are the experience, and we want everyone to feel empowered, no matter what their function is, to be a part of that experience.
Clint Betts
I wonder what it felt like for you, personally, when the first time you saved a life, because your product saves lives.
James Kubik
Yeah.
Clint Betts
What did that feel like to you, and how... I mean, I just wonder. You've built a product that saves lives, and it worked for you. Or were you-
James Kubik
Yeah.
Clint Betts
... like, "Well, I'll never do anything else again. I can't believe I'm able to do this."
James Kubik
Yeah. No, absolutely. I remember the first one. It was a backcountry skier in Rocky Mountain National Park. And I remember they actually used the SOS function that's on our hardware, and it went to a third-party rescue agency. This was back in the purely commercial days before we started working with more government organizations. And I remember we got this alert, and we were a team of four at the time, and we were tracking the whole thing. We were in touch with the rescue agency. And the rescue was finished, the person was brought to safety that actually broke their leg in the middle of Rocky National Park. And I remember we sat back and we're like, "Okay. We gotta keep doing this. We gotta grow this business." It was one of those where it was like, "Okay. We did what we set out to do, but doing it one time is just a point in time, right? Now, the only way that this makes real impact is if we scale." And so it was a massive motivator to go scale the business.
Clint Betts
That's so cool. That must've been just an insane experience and an insane feeling. Who's a leader or an example of a leader that you admire?
James Kubik
Yeah. I'm going to go a little bit soft on this answer. Apologies for that. But I've learned from a number of different leaders, and we've had an incredible opportunity to be mentored by consummate executives. I can't say enough about their guidance.
But something that has stuck with me since I was very young, that I think has made me into the leader that I am today, is actually a note that I received from my grandfather, who was an executive in the insurance business back in the day. When I turned 16, he wrote me this letter, and it had three lessons that he has held with him through his life that he thought were beneficial. And one of them really shaped me. And that lesson was, "Do the right thing even when you know no one's looking." And, for me, especially in this role, my decisions don't just impact me. As a CEO, your decisions impact your team. Everyone that you represent in terms of your customer base, your partners, your family, the whole market that you're in, actually your actions impact. And ironically enough, you also have very little oversight. Very few of those stakeholders have any access to what those day-to-day decisions really are.
And so, that lesson for me has consistently been something that I go back to. And if I'm living against that lesson, against that kind of message, then I know that I'm at least an appropriate leader for all those stakeholders, and I have their best interests in mind with all those decisions.
So that to me, I think my grandfather and his words there are what helped me and shaped me into the leader that I am today.
Clint Betts
As a leader, and as a CEO, you are forced to look at what's happening outside of your company these days, whereas previously, maybe that wasn't as true, or maybe not true at all. But now, you have no choice as a CEO and a leader but to look at various political environments. I mean you, of course, even more so than most, when wars break out and things like this, and also the macroeconomic environment, and election years, and all of this type of stuff. How do you think about, one, your responsibility there as CEO to have to think about those things and lead through those things? And two, what are just your general thoughts on where we're at today and what you think this year is going to bring us?
James Kubik
It is absolutely the responsibility of the CEO to be informed and, I think, have a perspective on how to position the business for success, regardless of what the macroeconomic conditions are.
We are obviously in a current condition of instability and uncertainty. Everyone that I talk to, all the unique discussions that we have based on the nature of our business, the general consensus is not necessarily overwhelmingly negative or overwhelmingly positive, but it is a message of instability and uncertainty. And so, my perspective, in this type of time, you have to go back to fundamentals. At our business, we're thinking about how you go back to true fundamentals? How do you take a more conservative outlook and build an operating plan against that conservative outlook, as opposed to an extremely aggressive outlook that maybe we saw six years ago in the venture ecosystem? But I think now is the time to really understand your business, understand the fundamentals, understand the cash flows, and make sure, hey, you have a strong balance sheet.
A company like ours, in a lot of ways, we are built for these moments of instability and uncertainty. And so we are very proud that we can provide a lot of impact in these times. And so, yes, our business actually, we're seeing growth and we're seeing a lot of momentum because we're bringing resiliency and reliability to these uncertain environments. However, even with that, we are still taking a very conservative approach, making sure that we're operating off of sound business fundamentals. And so that's generally how I think about it.
One additional note. We have a mantra at our company, one of our mission operations folks brought, and it's, "Stay neutral, but believe." And I think that it's a good message for our current macroeconomic environment as well, where there's no reason to be pessimistic or negative. We can stay neutral and believe and have hope that there'll be a brighter future. So that's another thing that we espouse at Somewear.
Clint Betts
Stay neutral and believe. I love that. That's great.
James, I can't thank you enough for coming on the show and sharing your wisdom with us and your experience as a leader in building Somewear Labs.
We end every interview the exact same way. That is, at CEO.com, we believe the chances one gives is just as important as the chances one takes. And I wonder, when you hear that, who gave you a chance to get you to where you are today?
James Kubik
Yeah, absolutely. There's a specific one that comes to mind that really helped kick off this company. And I do have to say, I mean, my co-founder, my family, my investors, my mentors, have all absolutely enabled every step of this business and taken massive chances on me and the business.
But there's one that also just stands out, which is my college professor. His name's Greg Holderfield, Professor Greg Holderfield, at Northwestern University. He had the foresight to really open up a capstone project, and he came to us and said, "Design anything that you think would make a difference." And that broad prompt really enabled me to work on the beginning of what eventually became Somewear. But I can't thank him enough for taking that chance and, having a very broad scope in his capstone project, and then supporting me for many years on independent studies and whatnot as we worked through the seedlings of this business.
Clint Betts
James, thank you so much. Really appreciate it.
James Kubik
Absolutely. Thank you as well.
Clint Betts
Yeah, we'll talk again soon. Have a good one.
James Kubik
All right. You as well. Thank you.
Clint Betts
Okay. See you.