The Man Who Turned $5,000 into RingCentral

On Wednesday evening, an intimate group of people got to spend an hour inside the mind of one of the country's leading entrepreneurs - Vlad Shmunis, CEO of RingCentral.

It was all part of the Palo Alto Entrepreneur Club's "Fireside Chat" series.

The San Mateo-based RingCentral is over 1,000 global employees strong, and has successfully brought high-quality telephone services—such as multiple extensions and call redirection—into the hands of small businesses. The company is currently one of the leading providers of cloud-based phone systems for businesses.

The company's history goes back to the early '90s, when the Russian-born Shmunis started a different company, Ring Zero Systems. In its early days, Ring Zero's few dozen engineers could relate just as easily to the satisfaction of cutting the previously forbidding costs of telecommunications services for small businesses, Shmunis described.

"I knew there was this amazing demand for a communications solution software for very small businesses. And, something we could all relate to was that [what was offered by] the Windows platform—even though Bill Gates is one of my heroes—really, really sucked," he said.

The "pain" point proved real, and soon Ring Zero's alternative became mainstream, shipping out as integrated software in 25 million PCs. Motorola acquired the company for double-digit millions before deciding to focus exclusively on mobile platforms, cuing Shmunis' reprisal of the company reins in 2003 - and RingCentral was born.   

Not bad for a company originally funded through bootstrapping, a topic on which Shmunis virtuously specifies that the $5,000 used to fund the startup came more from his spouse's pocket than his own.

When the moderator for the evening, Angelika Blendstrup, asked whether it was skill, luck or timing that led to Shmunis' business success, Shmunis insisted that it was certainly the latter two, rather than skill. At one point, he joked about being lazy rather than a diligent networker in the company’s early days.

And when, later in the evening, Patch had the chance to ask Shmunis if it was fair to say that his business decisions often followed the path of least resistance, he smiled and agreed.        

Jokes aside, Shmunis also took the time to share his persona; perspective on the selection and hiring processes when building a team, insisting that ”there are no sacred cows” when weighing a team’s less important players.

Shmunis tempers this with faith in the workman-like spirit: “People want to excel. When we announced that this was going to be a world-class product, people lined up.” 

Visit http://www.ringcentral.com/.

For more information on the Palo Alto Entrepreneur Club, visit http://www.meetup.com/TECglobal/.