Hello, everybody. Thank you for joining us. We're here on the Tech Trailblazers Founders on Fire podcast series, where we get an opportunity to meet with some of our winners from last year. So without further ado, I'm delighted to introduce you to Hannes Bredler, who is a CTO and founder of RT Brick, who is one of our winners from last year.
They won the networking trailblazers. And he is here with me today with Richard Brandon, who's VP of strategy at RT Brick. Hello, gentlemen. Great to join us.
Hi, thanks, Alex. No problem at all. No problem at all. So obviously, winners last year in networking.
So perhaps this is a question for either of you who ever wants to dive in. Could you tell us a little bit about RT Brick and what technology you guys are wowing the networking world with? Sure. So I just kind of kick off very briefly and let's leave Hannes to answer our questions.
So yeah, we're, as you say, we're in the networking space, specifically focused at telcos and operators. And really the most unusual thing about us is that we're in what's called disaggregated networking. So networking is starting to go the way that computing went decades ago, which is that you buy your hardware and your software from different companies and you run one on top of the other. So yeah, we're in that space and we're doing the software part.
So basically building telco routers, competing with lots of big household names, running on what's a very interesting space, which is open hardware. And Hannes, maybe you can talk a bit about why that's happened now. And I think that's a good idea why it didn't happen 20 years ago. I guess it all started a little bit out starting 2008, 2009, where we started to see that there is an emerging segment of merchant silicon, right?
So companies like Broadcom and the like started to put out really chipsets, not just basic Ethernet, but more of what I call feature-rich Ethernet, having IP, IP-6, MPLS routing capabilities and all the things, Lance classification engines, all the things that you need to build a solid headshot of the product. I've been working at the time with a live router vendor. And with some concern, we saw how that trajectory from product generation to product generation was evolving. It was not just that the chips were relatively cheap, in fact, 10% of if we have built this in-house.
It is also, every generation, we saw speeds getting larger, faster, better power, footprint getting lower, and still more features, more onboard lookup memory, larger tables, larger offers, larger variants. And once you interpolate that line, we thought, hmm, we were obviously at the time very proud about building our own ASICs at the bottom. And you could clearly see the intersection course where those merchant silicon providers are a little bit leveling playing field and giving here a really a proper packet forward in silicon to build a fully-fledged router. And, well, we had several rounds of discussions.
And at some point, I changed the conclusion with Praveen Bandhakar, which was my product manager, that said, hey, those guys, it's not just chips. Those guys need software, particularly a networking software, a management stack, a routing protocol stack. This would be just the perfect opportunity to build something like this. And, well, this is basically the inception of Artigric and how we started the company.
Fantastic. So, I think that for you both, you and your co-founder, to step into the startup world, when you've been, you know, in a corporation, which was, I guess, if it's that type of technology, it's really large. What made you finally jump ship, or jump into this new opportunity? It was actually interesting.
I remember it was mid-February, and there was a big birthday party of one of my daughters. And a big extended family came in, including my own godfather. And at the time, FedEx was just ringing the doorbell and delivering a small package, which was actually a patent plate, right? So, every time when you file a patent, and after it gets approved by the U.S.
Patent Office, you get this small token of appreciation, you get that little patent plate. So, I was looking at that and showing, and said, yeah, I was doing this. And my godfather always used to be a really businessman, right? And he was then asking how does this all work with patents and stuff.
And they said, yeah, yeah, I'm doing this. And I get a, you know, a small bonus and all that. And he started then going a little bit into inquiry mode and said, so, you are doing all the thinking, right? And basically, that employer, he's reading all the benefits of that, right?
And how many patents have you been doing? I said, yeah, about 30 or so. So, and he was totally hustled and said, why don't you do something like this by yourself, right? And this really started off the thinking.
Oh, so, but you did have a lot of plugs by the end of it though. We did, we did. We had all of them. And a lot of appreciation, a lot of appreciation.
But now, obviously, you've got some more plugs on the wall, hopefully, and move that forward. And interesting, before we kind of started recording this, you were talking about Richard's involvement in the journey. So, when did that start? You mentioned that you, you brought in, you know, as a first-time entrepreneur, and obviously, you probably really got far to go, come on now.
He hopefully was helping you after casting all this problem by saying, look, do it for yourself. Then he goes, bye, I'll see you at the next birthday party. I have to say, I have to admit, running a company is a little bit like parenting, right? And just like with your first child, the first child gets exposed to the full incompetence of the parents, right?
So, obviously, my co-founder, Praveen, and myself, we had a strong engineering technical background. We knew what it takes to get the product right. But pretty much everybody that we've been talking to has told us, they said, look, do not too much think about your sense of technology, right? That's clearly one part of the ingredient for success, but it's not really the most important ingredient.
It's more about general distribution strategy, basically how to get multipliers, right? For the technology that we are trying to build and go to market. And we just looked into each other and said, look, I have absolutely no idea. I've not done this before.
So, whom do we know, right? Let me call Richard. He has done this at Discovery Juniper. So, he has probably some idea how to get this right.
And let's see if he has got appetite doing it once again at a really small start-up setting. I don't know if he did have appetite, so here I am. He's still here too, so you do have an appetite. So, obviously, you guys work well together.
You have worked together previously, so you've already had a good working relationship, because clearly you wouldn't be bringing someone on board but you didn't have a great working relationship in a mutual respect. So, obviously, that was a little while ago. How has the business grown? Because, obviously, you're talking about the telco service provider.
So, that always facts to me of long-lead time. I think that's a very good place to start. It is a long-lead time business. It's not very easy for these guys to change things, to change their operational environment.
It's easy to get frustrated as a vendor, even the big vendor. You've got some new technology, and it seems to take years to get into the network. And it's not a good match. It's not a typical match for a small company like us.
And when small companies like us do start playing in a telco space, normally it's with small telcos. It's kind of a natural fit. But we rather buck that trend with our first customer being Europe's largest telco, which is Deutsche Telekom. That's obviously fantastic.
But also, they have challenged us, I think it's fair to say. They're a very large company. They have very exacting standards. They have very high-quality standards when it comes to engineering, as you would expect.
And I guess that's been sort of hard, but also a bit of a blessing. I mean, Hannes has had to deal with the engineering requirements over the years, that when we do go to the next customer, you go, well, we've already done it for those telco. That's a good conversation starter. Wow.
I mentioned before the importance of seeking out advice, right? And one fellow founder always has given me the advice. He said, look, when you talk to customers, prospective customers, pretty much everybody is interested in your technology, loves to hear about new stuff kicking tires. But there is, very often you find yourself that you cannot really convert it to a deal.
And you need to listen out for certain patterns here, right? And one of those patterns is, hey, I really like your product. Could you imagine adding this and that, right? Which is quite different than to, oh, your product doesn't ADCD and I cannot deploy this, right?
But if you were talking to the former, then you know there is genuine interest in the product and it might actually get to a good probability of winning the deal. And this was essentially our first encounter with Deutsche Telekom. I remember we did pitch the network operating system and how scalable and distributed architecture it has to the backbone crew, which always was interested into the kind of technology and routing architecture. And they said, yeah, it's great.
I like it. But I really need you to actually run on a hardware forwarder, right? Unless you have a story with a 100 terabit forwarder I'm not really interested in. And at the same presentation, at the same pitch, there was one engineer that said, look, I'm not really sure if you're interested in this, but we have a project of really restarting software-defined networking in the access, right?
And given the modular approach that you just showed us, I think this is exactly what we need. Would you actually come over and basically give the same talk to some of my fellow co-workers because we really think what the app is interesting. So this was a little bit our first pivot. We had a solid networking operating system more focused on routing really the problem.
And then we said, look, we have a real need now for the access for the edge. There is L3 VPN, L2 VPN, residential access, all those protocols in addition to the platform protocols. And it paid very well off to the customer and actually followed on the path. I think to pick up on Anna's initial point, what you're getting is that little signal, which is not just what we'd like you to do, what we can get in a moment, but perhaps for less money.
But there's something we can't do right now that we'd really love to do. There's something missing. And that's, I guess, where we pivoted into that space and it's been a good idea. Well, it sounds like you've already possibly given some of the advice I would be asking for.
But what other advice would either of you give to people starting out on what seems like, from what you've said, almost impossible to be competing at this sort of level, with this type of technology from the ground up, you know? So it sounds like you've had quite a part of the Tyromian fun here, the mountain to climb. I would say there is two interesting phases, right? Phase number one is product definition phase.
What, let's say, networking architects think they need, right? And actually, the far more interesting phase is getting employed into the network, right? Then all of a sudden you see, hey, well, there is an operational phase, right? We need better telemetry support, maybe a machine learning thing, not too bad, monitoring all those 300,000 optical modules, right?
So when in the first phase, right, the product definition phase, and the second phase are too much apart, it's going to be a problem, right? And I would say, especially with large companies, they tend to, there's almost too much space in between, right? In the tier two, tier three markets, you most often talk to the guys who do the networking architecture and actually run operations, and you've got the full picture right from the beginning. With large shops, large carriers, you sometimes realize very late in the game of what yet is missing in your product.
So I would say, my advice would be, get very early, look out for those customers who can really give you the early proof that at least your MVP is complete and works, because otherwise, you're losing another job. Yeah, nobody wants to do that in the startup journey, for sure. Richard, how about from your side? Yeah, I think there's a few things, but possibly one of the things that I think you say a lot with innovative companies and companies that go first into the area or early into the area, is I'd just say recognize whether what you're trying to communicate and sell is whether your widget is better than the next place widget, and in what way, or whether what you're trying to do is to say, this is a new category.
And actually, people often just jump over at this and forget that. I really have to persuade you in the first place to do something completely different before you even go and go, what's the best widget for my job here? And, you know, I think we sort of like the national car market, I suppose, but very, very occasionally you get these huge shifts where you're not really buying the same products at all anymore. And that's our case with disaggregated networking.
There's not much point going out there saying, oh, we've got the best routing operating system around, until somebody has decided they actually want to buy a routing operating system different from the routing hardware. And so it's easy to kind of get confused and muddle all that stuff together. And I suppose I'm thinking more from a communications point of view, really, but also from a route to market, you know, it changes the partnerships. You know, we're traditional router vendors, which, you know, Anna has worked for and I've worked for.
You know, you always sell the whole thing as one big piece of hardware with a software integrated. So suddenly it opens up opportunities to be partnering with the independent hardware guys, and the whole world of system integrators, which is kind of a commoditized market, really. It's like, I can buy my XYZ router from one guy the same as I can from another. Suddenly these guys can plug everything together and actually add a load more value.
So, you know, the category itself becomes almost as important for you to champion as what have you done inside your own engineering team. Wow. I really like the car analogy, by the way, Richard, because if you look at it, right, what Tesla and friends are doing, they're really looking at the car as almost like an IT integration problem, right? There are several subsystems and the theme and telemetry, keeping everything on track, right?
Some of those components they built in-house, some they do outsourcing, but they're really good in integrating those different subsystems, right? Versus, I would say, German traditional car manufacturer way of thinking, oh, everything has to build around a wonderful, I don't know, six cylinder engine, 400 horsepower transmission and everything, and all about the electronics, that's head on, right? And what has been happening here in the car industry, that add-on is now really cool. core piece right and I'm really looking forward to such a thing happens in the desegregating world as well because if you look at it we don't really build our own chips so we really need to be good in integrating new chips faster right we need to build that software abstraction in the right way that we quickly can onboard a chip in one quarter of development right same thing new optical subsystems all this additional hardware that we don't manufacture and design so really building a router has become pretty much same an IT integration problem right rather than hey let's go to create this monolith so with that I mean that interesting area isn't there is so much that's changing in technology and I very much get what you're saying there with regards to categories you know everybody goes well then nobody needs that and then suddenly it's you know the hot potato that everybody can't get and that's all and you've also talked about sort of like the education for the industry and I noticed that you actually launched a manifesto very recently for that area so yeah yeah practicing what you preach there I think yeah well yeah I think we talked about it a lot internally and we just sort of felt it was worth putting a statement out there you know for everyone in the industry and there's obviously different audiences for that that the operators are key customers you know I think a lot of those guys they all we were talking earlier today on the call and myself we're sort of at this chasm you know they all know about segregation most of them are looking at it with various degrees of research projects lab work um some of them are actually implementing it and I don't think you'll find anything ago we don't think it's a good idea you know they all sort of see that the sunny uplands and kind of go yeah that's where we want to go but there's this you know to use the old cliche there's this chasm between where they are and where they need to get to and we're I suppose our message to those guys is you know sort of use it or lose it you know now's the time to do something because it's ready you've got people like coach telecom doing it in the edge you've got people in this um uh there's a similar company for us called drive nets the focus on disaggregation in the core and they've got um major deployments going on systems happening but I think a lot of people are really hesitant to know whether it's ready for prime time if you like and that was part of the reason we decided to put this manifesto out um but also to challenge the other vendors because it's a strange uh paradox that one of the great advantages for operators is a choice you know the idea is that they can go to multiple hardware vendors and pick and choose depending on product availability and price and feature set and um and they should be able to go to multiple software vendors so uh that that's never really been possible in the old world you really make a decision and then seven years later you're still tied into it so even though you know it seems an odd thing for a company to go we'd like a bit more competition please in a way we'd like a bit more competition please you know we do you know we want to see other people in there and we want to see some of the traditional guys rather than just kind of going this doesn't really suit us this new world thank you we'd rather it didn't happen we'd rather some of those guys embrace it too so that's kind of part about thinking towards our manifesto well there is a strength in that i know certainly that the critical national infrastructure there's a lot from the security agencies about opening up you know the infrastructure to have multiple vendors you're not very resilient you're not very very hard to change and that's really not the case in disaggregated networking it's very easy as it has been in computing it's very easy to go you know well i can change my server vendor out you know i can mix and match i can run two different server vendors that's not hard and that's never been possible in telco infrastructure until now literally never been possible um so that's yeah it's secure supply security they're the actual you know hacking by the security stuff factor um and the telco vendor industry in particular has been suffered from a lot of large consolidations names that have kind of been absorbed from siemens to alcatel to lucence you know they get absorbed and absorbed and you end up as a customer community with less choice less innovation than you'd like well yes it's challenging that's for sure so any other advice i mean you know obviously you've got to to look at investment you've got to look at how you build your team um you know keep customers happy finding customers any other little building i'm going to come up with one more i don't have to make me also but i think in general as a small company competing with big companies then good is often the enemy of best it's very easy to kind of go that's a good idea or somebody's asked us for that feature we could work with that partner and they're all good things but it's really important to find the best of the good things because otherwise you just end up using your limited resources without maximizing the output so um it's really easy to chase stuff and especially when you hire people from bigger companies and i work with bigger companies too so you get used to you know wanting to be doing a wide spectrum of things whether it's product features or marketing activities you know i want to be in all these countries and i want to go to all these events well you can't you know you have to be you have to be pretty ruthless and kind of go no what matters to us is some success here and that's what we need and you know here might be five countries that's fine it doesn't have to be 25 countries for sure similar here um number one uh work actually with uh people who want to work with you right um and that uh actually the best customers that we have on our list and the best uh engineers that we have found uh is actually people who have approached us and said hey look this really looks interesting and we'll work together um and i would also um absolutely say what richard has been saying is right um focus right uh the hardest thing and also the most crucial one is saying no right uh because in networking there is uh the tree the decision tree just rose so quickly so exponentially right you have to think uh about which target market want to be in what kind of feature what ships it support and uh if you're uh i would say too permissive uh on one of those decisions you uh instantly uh have increased the magnitude of your problem by one dimension so uh uh focus execution the art of saying no is the most crucial thing i would say for survival in fact because otherwise you spread yourself too thin you get distracted you become a master of none yeah obviously from our perspective you know we were delighted that you were crowned is that the kind of thing that's important for you to get some recognition sort of outside of your your area yeah it's very important i think it's important um when you're any company but it's particularly important when you're a smaller startup company you know your biggest challenge is credibility really and you know we're lucky that we can talk publicly about virtual telecom you know that's fantastic um you know there's a large organization who's spent a lot of effort selecting our products great but you know you want to you want to flesh that out with with other awards recognition it's important when you look to hire other people because they look at what's going on and they sort of see this stuff as well so you get better people as a consequence of those things too so you know i think that um these things are fantastic because it's you know any company can sit around and go look how good we are well trust us you know and it's it's you know we would say that wouldn't we um so you know having any bird parties out telling the world that they think you're good as well is a fabulous thing it's going to be helpful to you guys and hopefully has been helpful to you guys so is there anything you can tell us about what's next with artybrick well in terms of technology um i would say uh we are now seriously looking into uh optics uh so uh integrating optics open zr zr plus um basically uh we have typically those uh 10 15 000 type of hyper boxes uh from our oems and uh with those new kind of optical subsystems we can essentially replace uh a lot of the long wall transmission systems we call transmission systems and uh just that use case uh uh that business phase immediately goes to green right uh if you things into perspective uh uh transmitting a hundred gigabit signal over let's say 100 kilometers today you need roughly equipment in the order of fifty sixty thousand dollars right uh now with uh open uh networking equipment uh our most on top of that and uh for party optics you can achieve pretty much the same for half the price so there is a lot of uh cost revolution uh coming also with open networking and uh this is where you will see um uh i would say a lot of uh not just announcements but uh product availability okay well it's been delightful to have you both with us here today and very insightful so today i have been joined by richard brandon vp of strategy and hannes gregler who is founder of cto of our networking trailblazer winner arty brick and for all of you joining us that is the tech trailblazers podcast with the founders on fire and you can find out more at www.teptrailblazers.com or you can follow us on x at tech trailblaze or find us on linkedin thanks very much for joining us see you next time