Ben Edmond: 12:44
Big and living.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 12:45
Connectivity Companies like, yeah, like what?
Ben Edmond: 12:48
I started, you know, I walked out of Northeastern University as a kid that didn’t know anything in undergrad, and went to work for a company called MCI back in the mid 90s. MCI was the number two long-distance company when long-distance was a thing back then. And that was my first job out of college, and I never left the industry. And I, you know, grateful for the experiences that I had had for really meaningful, really strong outcomes that got me exposed to a lot of different aspects of, you know, how the business actually works on the sell side and buy side. I ran sales, product marketing, learned service delivery, learned all kinds of aspects of, you know, the operating guts of the business, and through that, you know, always find a way to grow faster and do well. But I also wanted to come out of that set of experiences and solve an industry problem that I, I felt was holding value creation back for the industry, while the industry handed value creation over to others, which made it just easier to create value.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 14:04
You know, what was when you first started? Well, I want to kind of back up because you had successful careers at a lot of different types of companies. And what made you strike out on your own? Because you could have kept going that route. You’ve worked at incredible companies throughout your career.
Ben Edmond: 14:23
Yeah. I’ve always been a you know, I think Judd Crothers, who is another successful entrepreneur that I worked with at FiberLight days, you know, said it well, you know, Ben doesn’t have a box. You know, I’m always looking for solutions. Even within the companies that I worked for, I was an intrapreneur if you would, try to disrupt the status quo and think about how we did things better, and, you know, scale and be more effective.
And that entrepreneurial bug has always been inside me. So, you know, I knew, you know, at my 42nd birthday, you know, at global capacity, making a very nice living, that my next path was not going to be doing another, you know, executive run. It was going to be starting something that I had a core belief had purpose, and I could do. And that’s what I did in 2015.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 15:24
What was it about your 40th, you know, 42nd birthday at that time? Was it just like it is?
Ben Edmond: 15:31
The growing need? You know, we had just completed an acquisition that I helped orchestrate that got us over $200 million. We had a strong organic engine going like I felt we hit the, the, the objectives that we were trying to accomplish. And the investor had a really nice return on the process. But that, you know, that’s when I saw a path where, you know, I knew my next step was coming. And as Global Capacity was going to get integrated into a much larger organization, I could have gone down that path, but I wanted to start a new path.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 16:10
Yeah. You had a crossroads at that point. You’re like, okay, it’s time to make a decision, right? I mean, it was a natural place, but that decision is still difficult. What did life look like in your personal life look like? You’re married, you have kids, because like, do you go back and say, hey, I have this great job that pays well? I’m going to start on my own, get paid nothing, and work long hours. I mean, that’s probably hopefully not how you presented it, but what did personal life look like at the time?
Ben Edmond: 16:40
Pretty, pretty close to how I presented. So I’ve been married for 21, 29 years now, so I was married at the time. I got married the month literally out of undergrad at Northeastern to Susie, my wife, and we’ve been married ever since. I have two boys, 18 and 20 now. You know, I think ten years ago there were eight and ten when I made this decision, or seven and nine, to be specific. When I made the decision, and I presented it, you know, much to what you just said. You know, I have a desire.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 17:16
It’s not a good pitch.
Ben Edmond: 17:16
Change something meaningful.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 17:18
Okay.
Ben Edmond: 17:19
And, I want to go do it. And I got the support from my family, as I’ve always had. And, I had the conviction that I could do this, and a strong network in the industry of people who support me and continue to support me.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 17:33
What I’m curious about, you know, as a business starts typically doesn’t always start how it, you know, ten years from now, it’s been over a decade. It, you know, the product offerings. What was the original idea behind the services you were going to offer or products?
Ben Edmond: 17:54
To digitize and transform how the connectivity industry buys and sells? So I have not wavered from my original strategy. Like most companies actually do, I’ve changed names. I started as connected to fiber and changed it to connect base. I’ve, you know, tidied up the product packaging and thought process. But the core strategy and vision have been 100% aligned from day one. And my ugly, you know, 2016 pitch deck, when I started to educate the venture market on what I was trying to do, and everyone thought I was crazy for the telecom industry. But, you know, it was literally the strategy that you see before is the strategy I had then.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 18:46
Did you decide at that point whether you were going to raise money to start the company or bootstrap?
Ben Edmond: 18:52
The company bootstrapped. Bootstrapped at first. I knew I was going to raise money at some point, but I wanted to prove that I could get there with a material amount of proof points. So I raised money about two years into the journey, with almost 100 customers under my belt on the sell side only. So the supply side. So I knew I wanted to start there. I had no buyers, no channel partners. It was all about getting the suppliers to clean up their data and create value around that, and then help them publish the data until, you know, an API connected fabric could be created, which took about four years to get into the market on both sides of the buy-sell.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 19:41
And from you’ve served some large customers, talk about the initial customers, some of the milestones early on. I mean, I know you have connections in the industry, but it doesn’t matter. Like, people are still busy and still hard. So yeah.
Ben Edmond: 19:56
Absolutely.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 19:56
Talk about how you navigated that early on.
Ben Edmond: 20:01
And today Connectbase does business with 30 out of the top 30 operators in the US market, nine of the top ten operators in the European market, and 82% of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant on global wand provider. So we’ve penetrated the large, you know, fairly well. But we didn’t start with the large day one. We started with the competitive fiber operators. One, I knew that industry inside and out from my experience in my past life, that’s where I had deep relationships and deep knowledge, and understood their pain of how they did business today, trying to be found with spreadsheets and emails and other things that are inefficient. So I tacked that, and we got a lot of traction, you know, pretty quickly, as a blue ocean where, you know, we weren’t competing with something similar.
We were competing against the status quo and how things were done. And it was that critical mass of the competitive landscape that then went to the cable goes and then went to the LECs that created the opportunity to get the very large companies, where it was just a compelling value prop that, you know, we were demonstrating clear value that they could understand either on the demand side or the supply side. That is a it’s a good talk track and position. We always have competition, but there’s no one doing what we’re doing the way we do it. It’s its point Solutions that we compete against, and then to build it yourself, which will always compete, especially in those large providers.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 21:45
Yeah. So you started, I mean, obviously there’s a lot of impressive logos on your website now, but you started with the kind of the more competitive fiber operators because you could get in the door and chat with them, and you kind of built up from there. It sounds like you got it.
Ben Edmond: 21:59
Absolutely took a crawl, walk, run approach, running pretty much all the time. But, you know, I wanted to go where the friction was the least to do business, more open to sharing, more open to a new way of thinking.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 22:16
Talk about the value prop. So when you go in, I mean, we have to talk about the early, early days. But like now, if on the maybe, what’s the value prop? What do you tell a company on the demand side and supply side? Like, here’s the value proposition that makes it a no-brainer. How do you describe it?
Ben Edmond: 22:35
Yeah. For buyers on the buy side, our value prop is to add automation controls and intelligence to the buying process. That translates into improved win rates. Because when you’re buying in the industry, you’re buying to try to earn that enterprise on the other side. And we have, you know, good empirical evidence around our ability to impact those win rates. We do impact margins positively as well. When you’re making systematic decisions in a data-driven way, you end up improving your margin profile of how you buy things. But really the speed and, and, and what you’re buying to impact win rates is the biggest return on investment. And then there’s the proverbial issue that every buyer has more work than possible.
So being able to keep up with the demand and the pressure they’re being put under with tools that are designed for how they operate as part of the value prop we bring on that side. On the supplier side, the sellers out there have a different set of conversations. One that’s easy to understand is the demand aggregation. Instead of trying to go and figure out how to get each buyer to connect or swivel chair into your portal or to experience you in some way. We have an integrated fabric that we once plugged you into. There’s no IT build; there’s nothing but a decision on both sides to say yes. And then you’re connected to the demand flow. And when you have hundreds of those providers connecting into the demand flow, that demand flow is a big number and motivates people to want to participate in the ecosystem.
The second aspect is the data and the shaping of demand. So when you think about our value proposition of not just connecting to the demand, but how do you optimize price, how do you present the right things in a data-driven way? Understanding competitive intensity, your fit to the, to the demand that’s coming in, all kinds of things shape and influence a decision. And we help do that at scale with the tools that we do. And then we help them find new partners as well, not just participate more effectively in what they already know.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 25:12
I’d like to hear that, Ben, because it’s interesting, you know, how you talk about their features and then how that translates into their benefits, essentially, because it makes for obviously clear what’s the value they’re going to get out of it. And you mentioned this is a little bit frictionless. I love the word frictionless. You know, in a lot of cases, especially when it comes to business. But talk about a frictionless ecosystem and the transactions there.
Ben Edmond: 25:45
It’s really important when you think about the underlying, you know, realities of the market I serve, telecommunications is one of the most regulated markets historically, the fragmentation, the capital intensity, the reality that not everywhere is actually built out optimally. Even today, the world is not, you know, fiber-connected when multiple ways everywhere, always there’s this process of build out that continues not just in Africa and Latin America, but right here in the United States. And what we’re trying to do is, you know, put a layer over those realities and create an opportunity where somebody can see the right thing at the right time and make a decision in real time that then gets actioned.
And to us, that’s the frictionless commerce that we’re trying to create, and we’re making real headway in that thought process. And if we can take friction out of the discovery process, the quote process, the order process, the inventory process, which historically just ordered inventory, that was a fat finger manual swivel chair of multiple systems and bad records with inefficient information that led to a whole industry being created called telecom expense management, with about $3 billion in spend. Because the industry was so bad at putting data in the invoice and the inventory and reconciling it properly. And we want to take the friction out of all those steps to then go back and keep on optimizing, you know, how this industry actually works and creates value.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 27:30
And I said at the top of the interview, obviously, AI has changed a lot over the, you know, historically, overall, but especially in the Connectbase journey. Talk a little bit about AI these days.
Ben Edmond: 27:47
We look at AI from three dimensions at Connectbase, and it is a it is a incredible tailwind to our future success, which we’re excited about. The tailwind number one of our lens is that the AI infrastructure, both on a training and an inference basis, requires new connectivity to be built, monetized, and used out in the market. That doesn’t exist today and is being deployed. The amount of capital being deployed for it is greater than the initial cloud movement or the initial wireless build-out with smartphones, which is healthy for this industry and creates, you know, pressure to go buy and sell more, which is good for us. And so these AI corridors, the new edge deployments that create inference opportunities with low latency, all use cases that the connectivity industry is starting to learn, understand, and gravitate to.
And we’re packaging our solutions to help them monetize that properly. The second perspective of AI is really in the efficiency of who we are and what we do. We have 2.2 trillion data points on the connected world today. Two point trillion trillion, not billion. It’s a big data stack all centered around this concept. That location is ground truth for how the industry actually operates because of the relationship between fragmented supply and how connectivity needs to get to a destination, whether it’s content, cloud, or services like Zoom. So we can talk. That relationship makes understanding at a granular location level the only way to truly make a decision on how to buy or sell something.
So we built what we call location truth and invented a global location ID system that connects the dots on supply, demand, and perspectives around that that we use in the process, but that helps us accelerate our mission in the business. And we’ve incorporated AI into that back-end efficiency, leveraging the data to shape how we do business better and faster. And the third is on the customer-facing side, the buyer’s assistant and seller’s assistant. There are just things you can do with AI today that were near impossible to do just 12 months ago with the stack. So internally, we’re looking at AI tooling just like Java and SQL and core capabilities of a smart software stack. Then we go and build new experiences. Because ultimately, those experiences that lead to outcomes are what our business is all about.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 30:41
What kind of AI are you playing around with? It could be personally, I mean, with the company, or just however you use it individually.
Ben Edmond: 30:52
Individually, I’m a nerd who likes to explore, so I use lots of things to try to understand perspectives. But from a company perspective, we’ve leaned in hard on Claude and Anthropic as the tool of choice. We’re using ChatGPT and Codex in some context, really from an efficiency standpoint, to manage our token use in Claude effectively, because it can, you know, get uncontrollable fast if you don’t have the proper guardrails around it, but Claude is the primary. And what we’re finding is the best path for success for us right now. Personally, I view I use them all, Gemini included, perpetually, all kinds of different flavors.
We have a customer success platform called Planhat that’s got embedded AI playbooks into it. HubSpot’s got some fantastic AI capabilities within the CRM that we use. So, you know, it’s not just the big models and core names, it’s how AI is getting embedded into Datadog, you know, their AI enablement inside of the monitoring platform we use just simplifies the understanding of things going on faster and better than ever. Like, it just doesn’t take a lot of code reading anymore to go through and diagnose something. You can get to the heart of what’s going on and resolution time, you know, 50 or 100 X improvement from where we were two years ago.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 32:39
Yeah. And, you know, I’m of the same camp. I really like how, you know, a lot of tools I’m using are incorporating AI. So I may not have to go to AI. So I’m curious about your tech stack. You mentioned HubSpot obviously is pulling in AI. I don’t know from a project management perspective and internal chat perspective, and Confluence.
Ben Edmond: 33:00
Yeah, we use Jira and Confluence. We still like Monday.com for the board presentation to customers for the onboarding process. In particular, Hubspot’s. Both our CRM and marketing stack, from a preference standpoint, where slack heavy, you know, as an entrepreneurial tech company, Slack is a great form of communication internally for us. We use Teams and Outlook from Microsoft’s standpoint. And then we, you know, try to build cool things that customers need.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 33:40
Yeah, it was interesting. HubSpot came up a lot. And so I had the founder of Delphi.ai, where you can kind of clone yourself and, you know, essentially have people ask questions. And so I actually did, they have one of the co-founders of HubSpot on the platform, Brian Halligan. So I reached out to Delphi. I’m like, hey, I’m gonna have Brian. So I actually interviewed Brian Halligan’s AI clone, not Brian Halligan. So it was an interesting interview, just, you know, having him on and sharing, exploring how he built HubSpot, etc., so it was a fun interview.
Ben Edmond: 34:18
Yeah, yeah. That’s fun.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 34:21
First of all, Ben, I do want to talk about the conference because you hold a conference every year. If you’re watching the video, you can see behind him. If you’re watching ten years from now, there’s still probably a conference going on. And I’m going to pull up the website where you can find it. But what was the reason? You know, conferences are big lifts, right? You guys are already busy.
Ben Edmond: 34:44
Real work.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 34:46
Why have the conference, and people can check out connectbase.com/tcwlive. I’ll pull it up. But why have a conference?
Ben Edmond: 34:55
Yeah.
Ben Edmond: 34:56
I think there are a couple of core reasons. One, I personally believe people still matter. And getting the human connection to technology is an important part of what we try to accomplish. And this does a really nice way of doing exactly that, bringing people. Dan Kruse, So that you just saw on the screen was our keynote last year as a founder of one of the big fiber operators and industry consolidators, but connecting people is important.
We’re a matchmaker at heart, so we’re connecting buyers and sellers and channel partners together. And that matchmaker component gets executed every day. But this conference brings together, we’ll have 900,000 people at the Marriott Marquis in Chicago, and we’ll be able to connect people out there and make introductions so they can go do business digitally from there. And then lastly, educating on new ways of doing things, like there’s still a need as we shape and transform how things get done. For us to really teach and our customers to teach other customers, and collaborate as an ecosystem that needs each other. And this becomes a forum for getting up on stage, having panels, and really spending the days together, learning.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 36:25
Maybe talk about some of the past. I know you’ve done it at the conference a number of times. Who are some of the fan favorite speakers in the past?
Ben Edmond: 36:34
Oh geez. We had Henry Schuck, the CEO and Founder of ZoomInfo. He did a great job. Came up on stage. He’s a fellow Bostonian. A person from my area. We had a Founder for Ryan Reynolds, the Founder of the Alternative Stock Exchange, and a former MCI salesperson like myself, you know, talking about the reality of low-latency trading and hedge funds and the need for connectivity to make all that happen in that industry. That was entertaining and interesting. And then last year, you know, Zayo was acquired by almost 50 other companies, including just closing on Crown Castle and a huge multibillion-dollar transaction here. And Dan tells the story. He had just written the book Bandwidth and signed copies at the conference. But I got to hear live from him, you know, rehashing the deregulation, the boom of the internet, and the bust, and all the changes from the last 25 years. It was pretty fascinating.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 37:55
To learn from someone who has made acquisitions of a billion in the billions is pretty incredible, you know.
Ben Edmond: 38:01
Absolutely.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 38:02
I’ll have to check out the book. It’s called Bandwidth.
Ben Edmond: 38:05
Yeah.
Ben Edmond: 38:05
It’s called Bandwidth. Dan Caruso is the author. It’s easy. Great read. It’s fairly lengthy.
It’s about 500 pages. But it’s an easy read to get through. And very interesting if you care about the connectivity industry here.
Ben Edmond: 38:22
Right. You got a story.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 38:24
Of ambition, deception, and innovation that shaped the internet age and .com boom.
Ben Edmond: 38:28
All kinds of great.
Ben Edmond: 38:29
Stories, and a number of them that I live through, which is fun to see.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 38:35
I’ll have it. I hope there’s an audible version there, so I’m going to check it out. But yeah, people can check it out. You know, if you go to their ConnectBase.com, you go to TCW LIVE, and you’ll find the latest, latest one on here. I was just clicking here, just seeing the 2026 version. But whenever you’re listening, check it out. Ben, last question. First of all, thank you. Last question. Thanks for sharing your journey lessons. It’s pretty interesting. Such an industry, I’m thinking, didn’t exist. Right. And maybe talk about some of your favorite resources. It could be people like mentors that you had in business. It could be distant mentors like books, right? Like we just mentioned, bandwidth or any of your favorite books that you’ve learned from in your, in your business journey as well?
Ben Edmond: 39:33
Yeah, no, I’ve got many. And I try to absorb as much as I can. Audible is my favorite way to consume books these days. Tell me.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 39:41
Just tell me what you got on your queue in your queue here.
Ben Edmond: 39:44
I’m. I’m listening to a physics book as we speak. Just for fun. But it goes back to The Beginning of Infinity from 1997. But it’s, it’s, it’s pretty interesting and done by David Deutsch. If you have ever heard of him, a famous physicist who’s got some life lessons embedded in the book that apply to business, and people I like to learn from, from, you know, people I consider both friends and customers in the industry, a lot. I formed an advisory board early on, and I think it’s part of what has led to my success. People like Mark Dyman, you know, have shaped and influenced John Dobbins, Sreenivas, John Nolan, Tony Rossabi, folks in the industry that have been there, done that, that helped give me feedback along the way, both in, you know, how the product should come together, but just as importantly, how to build sustainable great businesses.
And those things are important to me. So I, my investor side, but I also had the advisors helping shape, you know, who we are and what we did. And people like Ernie Ortega, you know, or CEOs of service providers, and, you know, successful in the business. Joe McCourt. Great guy. I learned a lot from his perspective, both running Uniti Fiber enterprise sales, but he used to be a buyer for, you know, a big retailer, and had that perspective as well. And Srinivas, you know, used to be my IT director 20 years ago. And today he’s at PayPal in a SVP of technology position, not the title he’s got there. And he’s just one of the smartest guys I know, and just an absolutely fantastic human being.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 41:48
At what point in your journey, then, did you form this advisory board? It’s such a smart idea.
Ben Edmond: 41:55
In year two, I started year two. I’ve changed it up a little bit. But yeah, I started it fairly early comparatively. But I, you know, was pretty convinced. I was going to have success in scale. And I wanted to find people who helped me get there.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 42:12
What did you get advice on? Obviously, all these people are smart, busy people. How do you get them interested in being on an advisory board? Is it just okay? I mean, I know some people pay them, some people offer introductions, some people give them equity. I don’t know what your thoughts are on that, okay, I want to attract the best people to my advisory board.
Ben Edmond: 42:35
Yeah, I never paid or had to, but I always offered equity just like I did to my entire team at Connectbase as we went through the journey. It’s just part of my strategy of building alignment with the outcomes that I thought were what we’re all working hard towards, and doing things with purpose. Like every one of the people there, I think, believes to the core that we’re doing something that means something for a really important industry, not just because connectivity matters to connectivity, but our entire digital world and way of life rides on connectivity. It’s really important. It’s like the highways for automobiles. Like it’s just the way it helps execute. And the people in my surrounding area, on the advisory board and relationships, you know, they believe that what I was doing was going to change the industry for the better.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 43:37
Ben. Thank you. Thanks for sharing the journey of Connectbase. People can check out ConnectBase.com to learn more. Check out more episodes of the podcast. And Ben, I just want to be the first one to thank you for sharing.
Ben Edmond: 43:51
My pleasure. Thanks for having me. It was fun.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 43:53
Thanks.
