April 28, 2022
Rami Rahim, CEO of Juniper Networks
True AI & The Future of Networking: Rami Rahim – CEO Juniper Networks
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If you are looking for someone to invest $100 M or so in your venture, talk to David Gow.
I recently talked to David about his new blank check company, created through a SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Corp) IPO with the NASDAQ raising $115 million. SPACs have been all the rage over the last 24 months, with over 850 of them taken public. Once they are public they usually have 18 months to find an acquisition. With that type of short fuse timeline, there are many out there shopping for the right companies to fit their investment target.
First off, how exactly does a SPAC work? As David recounts, it’s the opposite of the typical money raising process which involves an operating entity, a business it grows up, and becomes large enough to then go public, or list on an exchange like the NASDAQ and raise a lot of capital through an IPO. “In the SPAC world, it’s backward. We’ve created a hollow company listed with NASDAQ that can raise a lot of capital. But now we’ve got to go find the operating business. And that’s why it’s often referred to as ‘a blank check company.’ We’ve been given over $100 million to go identify and acquire or merge with a great operating business. Our special purpose is sports tech.”
With so much private equity currently available, why would you go this route? As David sees it, the opportunity brings together capital, a board which has great expertise and that public stock. “For some businesses, having a public stock creates a great currency for additional acquisitions. So we are a time and cost efficient way for a private entity to get to the public realm.” He has a point there. The planes, trains and automobiles of the roadshow process and all the filings required for an IPO are not for the faint of heart or wallet.
So what is his SPAC looking for (contact me if you want in!) are companies where technology is innovating the sports industry: eSports; health and wellness including wearable devices and businesses like Peloton which are both software and hardware; fan engagement including smart stadium technologies and fantasy and gambling.
David is also the CEO of Gow Media, the largest media company in Texas with properties like SportMap Radio Network, 2 ESPN local stations, a lifestyle site, an automotive and a sports site. He is particularly bullish on esports because the business models are still being defined and he and Gow Media can play an active role in that. As college athletes become able to monetize their name, image and likeness, he plans to build a platform to connect athletes with brands. NFTs also hold huge promise when connected to athletes.
One thing that David believes is a big part of fueling innovation in start-ups in his region is The Cannon, which provides support infrastructure and colocation of support resources. The Cannon offers “an angel network of investors, a mentor network, shared services of fractional CMOs and CFOs to help businesses who couldn’t afford a full time employee community building programs when somebody gets a big VC round.” Being on of the cofounders and board member of one of the largest incubators in the world, 1871 in Chicago, I can attest to how essential this sort of support is.
Juniper Networks and Cloud Based Technology
As Rami says “Juniper has always been a true innovator in IP networking technology. We were builders of the infrastructure that helped the internet scale at a time when service providers were really struggling to keep up because it was at the cusp of the.dot-com boom. Imagine a little upstart company trying to convince service providers to trust their networks with a startup’s technology. The only reason I think we managed to get that kind of trust was because they really had no choice. Traffic was exploding. They needed technology that could keep up with it. We had an innovative new architecture and were developing routers with silicon technology. We offered a very scalable internet, and a great operating system to keep up with that demand.”
Juniper has rebooted itself for the cloud-based world, “But we have evolved our business and diversified it. Now it’s very nicely split between telecom operators, which remain extremely important to us, cloud providers, (all of the major hyperscale cloud providers in the world are our customers), and global 1000 type enterprises that are increasingly trusting their networks, on our technology. In the early days, our claim to fame, our credibility, our pedigree was scale and performance. But things have evolved beyond that into experience. Right now, if I talk to a CTO, CIO or CEO of a big fortune 500 company or a telco or a cloud provider, their biggest challenge is complexity in network operations that is slowing them down. The solution to that is software driven innovation, AI-driven innovation that will remove the complexity from running networks. And yes, it will remove the human factor from running networks altogether.”
AI and Data
Rami is a big believer in the “data is the new oil” paradigm that prognosticators like Scott Galloway talks about. “Data is now the most precious, valuable resource in the world and we as a planet are accumulating data at an unprecedented scale,” he says. “I heard the stat that 90% of all data in the world has been accumulated in the last two years alone. So now the question is, what do you do with all this data?”
To Rahim, “That’s where AI comes in. There is no way for human beings to process this data manually.” So what is AI, that much misunderstood and jargonized entity? To Rami, “AI is this new breed of learning – not learning through programming algorithms, it’s actually learning by looking at patterns in data, and connecting it to our industry. We are as an industry sitting on a goldmine of information that today is largely untapped. AI, as applied to our industry of networking, is incredibly promising. It gives our customers the ability to collect data in real time, I’m not talking about the spooky customer focused AI, but the performance data that gives us real time visibility of the experience of every user on the network as they do whatever they need to do on that network. You take that data, you learn from that data, and then you automatically translate it into useful things.”
What’s the outcome? “For our customers we are looking at things like the fastest deployment times, the fewest trouble tickets, the fastest time to resolution of trouble when there is in fact trouble. Typically, you’re solving problems before humans even know that a problem exists.” With the ability to expand through building, buying and borrowing capabilities, look for Rami and his teams to continue their growth through a smart mix of partnerships, investments and acquisitions.
