Today's Entrepreneur: Jonathan Gael

Kristin Karaoglu · August 19, 2011 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/1df6

No.1 mistake: Not questioning every assumption

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Today's Entrepreneur is Jonathan Gael, co-founder of Ether2.

According to his VEQ (Vator entrepreneur assessment test), he is thought leader and is good at project development and networking.

You are a(n):
Entrepreneur

Name companies you've founded or co-founded:
Ether2

Name companies you've invested in:
Ether2, ATT, Bellsouth

Name startups you worked for:
Nextel, Teligent, Broadband Office, Panda Software

If you are an entrepreneur, why?
To kill switch routers so that we can enter a new age of computing.

List your favorite startups:
Ether2, Razient, Verabella Beverly Hills, Profunder, Sharemeister

What's most frustrating and rewarding about entrepreneurship/innovation?

Frustrating: Seeing the big picture and having a credible plan to knock 3% of our national electric spend, but having all the proof points seem all too technical. Example: A partner at Rho who was on a panel that judged my pitch in the Bay Area. Bumped into him at Splash LA and he said, "Ether2...oh yeah...that complicated network thing." Also, knowing that one has a solution that can solve global societal issues that are much bigger than any particular website, but being held to the same criteria as some SoMoLo play.

Rewarding: Having achieved proof of concept with no money down.

What's the No. 1 mistake entrepreneurs make?

For us, it was not questioning every assumption. We assumed that we needed to build a prototype after being told by VCs that we needed a prototype, and we spent our seed fund trying to bring that FPGA chip into being. Had we known then what we know now... 5 years later, based solely on marketing our intellectual property, we have been able to gain significant traction which has led to proof of concept, and we have been selected for wireless backhaul by a low power wireless sensor protocol stack.

What are the top three lessons you've learned as an entrepreneur?

1) The road is long for fundamental change.

2) Investors will never be satisfied with the state of the company's progress until the company is at revenue.

3) Visionaries and founders may not be the best people to raise money or run the company. As long as the project gets wings...that's okay.

Kristin Karaoglu

Woman of many skills: Database System Engineer; SplashX event producer; Author of Startup Teams

All author posts

Related Companies, Investors, and Entrepreneurs

Ether2

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on May 13, 2011

How about one type of network for every type of communications, and so any device can talk to any device? And what about a company that will act like a public utility, enforcing telecommunications privacy law in broadband while providing access for court ordered law enforcement?

The Ether2 Community of Network Operators & Developers (EcoNode) is forming with these types of goals in mind, and for any engineer anywhere in the world to use our technology at no fee. Only in the United States will we enforce our intellectual property rights when the technology is used commercially; but never in a way that would prevent adoption of the technology to launch a new market or to better society.

DQ has now been applied to two Internet of Things global radio standards, and has yielded a ~100% network efficiency, up from 36% with Frame Slotted Aloha which was the former DASH7 switch architecture. DQ was invented for cable TV back in the 90s...before DOCSIS was chosen as the cable TV standard. Scientific Atlanta named our collision detection mechanism (XDQRAP) for eliminating bottlenecks in cable TV networks. Cable TV switching is now well into it's third generation with DOCSIS 3.0, but it still can't do Ethernet. So cable customers have to run two modems (from the same company) if they want cable TV and Internet connectivity.

Fortunately, DQ does Ethernet better than Ethernet so we can finally converge both types of network transmission to a single channel. This type of efficiency means that any content owner would have equivalent distribution power, because a single transmission could be received by millions of devices...just like TV, but where an IP address can be thought of as a channel instead of a destination. This allows for one:one, one:many, or one:all, again, for the technical cost of a single stream.

With DQ, not only will the Internet have every advantage coveted by traditional broadcasters and cable/sat TV, but IP-based transmissions will become inherently secure, so that we can enforce telecommunications' privacy law in broadband. We will also lower the energy demand for telecommunications by reducing the middle hardware requirement and by cutting wireless retransmissions in half, so to operate at the lowest possible energy per bit transferred.

Jonathan Gael

Joined Vator on May 13, 2011

Jonathan Gael is a Co-Founder of the breakthrough technology company, Ether2, where he and the team are on a mission to close the digital divide for billions of people and trillions of sensors that will comprise the next-gen Internet of Things.