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Jive Communications has been a top provider of business VoIP services since 2005. Silicon Slopes chatted with Brent Thomson, Jive's CEO, about what led to the creation of Jive and the future of the VoIP space.

Silicon Slopes: When was the first time you knew you wanted to be an entrepreneur?

Brent Thomson: I never really planned on becoming an entrepreneur. I know now that I want to continue being one, though. Looking back, I can see that I was probably going to wind up working for myself someday. I was just lucky enough to fall into it backwards while I was in college.

Silicon Slopes:  What was your first company, and what happened to it?

Brent Thomson: I started my first company, Agile Studios, with a friend in college. It was a software engineering firm specializing in distributed systems. We sold most of the company in 2005 to a partner with whom we were working on a project. I wouldn't classify it as a huge financial success, but it was definitely an educational success on a life-changing scale.

Silicon Slopes: How did Agile Studios lead to your present company, Jive Communications?

Brent Thomson: By 2005, Agile had grown to 16 employees, but we still had the phone system we set up when we had only two employees. Our phone "system" consisted of two lines from Qwest and a couple of cordless phones. As you can imagine, with a 16 to 2 ratio, both lines were busy all day long and our customers were frustrated that they had so much trouble reaching us. We realized that we needed a real office phone system that would give us voicemail, the ability to transfer between extensions, and put people on hold, among other things.

I started pricing phone systems and was shocked that in order to get a system with enough handsets, along with the features I wanted, it was going to cost $30,000. So, instead of buying a system from somebody else, I put together my own for about 10% of that cost (plus a lot of hours building the thing).

Shortly after that, we sold the bulk of Agile and found ourselves with a bit of free time and an awesome phone system. One of Agile's old software customers had a little call center. They had heard about the phone system we had put together and they wanted one. Then another company wanted one. And then another. (You can see where this is going...) In 2006 we got serious about it and formed Jive Communications.

Silicon Slopes:  What is Jive Communications all about?

Brent Thomson: Jive offers the best phone systems that a small business can get. Honestly, Jive is more like a software or SaaS company than a telephone carrier, but the service we provide does take the place of the phone company.

We do everything we can to be the anti-phone company. Our customer service is excellent, our rates are low, our monthly statements are easy to understand, and we don't nickel-and-dime anyone.

Silicon Slopes:  What have you brought to the VoIP industry to make it better?

Brent Thomson: Most VoIP providers are merely an extension—albeit a favorable one—of a traditional telephone carrier. They use a lot of the same hardware on the back end. They institute a lot of the same policies as their predecessors and have a similar level of customer service. Many of their executives even came straight from a traditional telco.

Jive arrived in the VoIP space, not from the telco side, but from the software side. From top to bottom, our operation is different. We developed our own cloud-based calling platform before the term "cloud" was used to describe computing. Our management UI (user interface) is unsurpassed in power and ease of use.

Perhaps the most important thing we've brought to the VoIP industry is a company with some staying power. There have been several high-profile failures in the space and hopefully our success will help the technology and the industry reach a more main stream status.

Silicon Slopes:  What's in the future for VoIP and Jive?

Brent Thomson: VoIP will dominate the small business telephone space in less than a decade and Jive will be a major player in that market. VoIP is already widespread at the enterprise level and the cost is only now getting low enough that small businesses can tap into it, as well.

VoIP features, which are already far beyond the scope of traditional systems, will continue to improve as will the state of bandwidth for the small business. In spite of their well-documented struggles, municipal fiber networks will continue to pop up and new communications services will spring up to take advantage of the cheap new bandwidth.

The old-school telcos will work hard to preserve their monopoly, but the market simply won't allow them to continue in their old ways. The incumbents will cry and lobby and even play dirty, but in the end they'll just be resisting innovation. The consumer will eventually win.

Silicon Slopes:  Why do you focus on small businesses?

Brent Thomson: It's the most underserved segment of the business telephone space. It's also most accessible to a new startup.

Silicon Slopes: To what do you attribute your company's success?

Brent Thomson: The landscape is littered with the carcasses of failed VoIP companies. Two things have made us succeed instead of winding up as road kill.

First, we bootstrapped rather than raising a few million and then spending it. Setting a very constrained budget from the beginning forced us to do things that made Jive profitable quickly. In fact, we were profitable 11 months after starting the company. This budget constraint has also helped us set up a culture that provides real value to the customer. The value has allowed us to operate in a pretty boring way, without resorting to sales gimmicks or sneaky pricing strategies. We provide exceptional value for a great price.

Second, Jive is a software company that provides voice services, not a telephone company that uses software in its operation. Software (and by extension software companies) is, by nature, adaptable. History has shown that telephone companies tend to be on the opposite end of the adaptability spectrum.

Silicon Slopes: Has the economy had an effect on your continued growth? How so?

Brent Thomson: Surprisingly, it's had little effect on us. To be honest, we expected to see sales either increase (because we're a cost-effective alternative) or decrease (because businesses are hesitant to shake up anything unnecessarily right now), but our growth has still been pretty steady.

Silicon Slopes: What are the conditions that make Utah fertile ground for entrepreneurs and tech startups?

Brent Thomson: All the stuff you've heard 10 times before: highly-educated population, work ethic, quality of life, low cost of living (makes it easier to bootstrap), etc. These things have begun to sound like clichés, but they're the truth.