HHCIB 012 Steve Kokinos & Messaging Diaspora

How Hard Can It Be?

This week my guest is Steve Kokinos, founder and CEO of Fuze, a unified communications platform that improves business productivity by integrating voice, video, and always-on collaboration into a global, cloud-based service and all-in-one app people actually want to use. Under Steve’s leadership, Fuze has become one of the hottest and most highly regarded startups in Boston, creating the Unified Communications as a Service market and transforming the way enterprises view communications as a key driver of business visibility, process improvement, and results. Before Fuze Steve was a founder of BladeLogic, a company he took public at $17/share before it was acquired by BMC software for $28, and WebYes, an early market leader in the Web hosting and application service provider business acquired by Breakaway Solutions in advance of their IPO in 1999. Steve is 3 for 3, folks, and we spent the first part of our conversation talking about what he’s learned along the way, from startup through product market fit and scale. In our second segment Steve and I discussed the proliferation of apps and fragmentation of communications channels that’s ironically making it harder for all of us - at work and at home - to connect with each other. Think about how many messaging and communications apps you have spread across your laptop, tablet, and smartphone right now, then about the big, dumb piece of plastic that’s probably sitting on your desk at work, and all time, energy and effort we’re all wasting trying and failing to get the right info in the right context to the right person right now. Fuze solves that problem in a rather elegant way, of course, but having spent the last decade or so reflecting on how to help people and companies communicate more effectively, Steve’s got some great insight on the problem, where we are in solving it, where we’ll go from here. How Hard Can It Be is sponsored by G20 Ventures, early traction capital for East Coast enterprise tech startups, backed by the power and expertise of 20 ?of the Northeast's most accomplished ?entrepreneurs. G20 Ventures.?..?? ?People first. How Hard Can It Be is ?also ?sponsored by Actifio?. Actifio? virtualizes?? data ?the way a hypervisor virtualizes compute, ?to ?help customers enable the? ?hybrid cloud, build higher quality applications faster, and improve business resiliency and availability.? ?Actifio?... ?Radically Simple.?