How Lightyear evolved from founder-led sales to reps creating their own demand — and what broke in between | Dennis Thankachan

**Dennis Thankachan** (0:00)
If you are not there, or not on the path to there, there's nothing I can tell you about enterprise sales systems that's gonna be useful, because you're going to be selling something that probably shouldn't be sold.

**Brett** (0:13)
Welcome back to another episode of Builders. As always, this show is brought to you by frontlines.io, Silicon Valley's leading B2B podcast production studio. If you're bringing technology to market and want to learn from your peers, we have a library of more than 1200 interviews with venture-backed founders and marketers, where they talk all things go to market. Of course, if you want to launch your own podcast, we offer podcasts as a service to more than 80 tech startups. The idea there is very simple. You show up and host and we do everything else. Now with all that said, let's jump into today's episode.
Today, we're speaking with Dennis, co-founder and CEO of Lightyear. Dennis, thanks for being here.

**Dennis Thankachan** (0:52)
Thank you for having me on, Brett.

**Brett** (0:54)
Of course, I'm glad to have you back. It's been three or four years since the first time, so always fun to reconnect. Talk to us about Lightyear, what does Lightyear do?

**Dennis Thankachan** (1:01)
So Lightyear is the AI native platform that automates how enterprises manage their telecom. So things like an enterprise internet connection, data center space, dark fiber, phone systems, things of that nature that are mission critical to how enterprises operate.
You as an enterprise network operator can use Lightyear to buy services, track inventory, manage installs, pay bills, manage expenses, deal with tickets, all of the various things that go into a telecom operation. It's a lot of very technical, very boring infrastructural type of stuff that is extremely important to how enterprises operate.

**Brett** (1:44)
What's the origin story here? How did you end up in this space? I don't want to say it seems like a random space, but it is a different type of space than the thousand other companies or founders that I've had on. I don't think I've talked to anyone that's operating this space.

**Dennis Thankachan** (1:55)
Yeah, it's interesting. Telecom is a multi-trillion dollar market where literally every human being is a telecom customer, unless you're truly off the grid, but it feels like a random space because it feels like a small world. I worked at a large hedge fund where I led their investing activities in telecom for a period and developed a strong interest in the space. I quit to start a company in the space that was different than what Lightyear ended up becoming. But in the context of starting that company, I started learning about how businesses buy telecom services and realized that there's a massive information asymmetry problem and businesses are either managing the stuff manually out of spreadsheets or using hordes of consultants or what you call telecom brokers or agents that cause a lot of problems like principal agent type problems in the context of how businesses buy.
And it's just a lot of manual grunt work managing the stuff. And if you could enable businesses with software to manage stuff better, they could save a lot of money, operate more efficiently and just get to significantly better outcomes. And I think I've chipped away a bit at proving that's true.

**Brett** (3:04)
If we zoom out, maybe let's talk about scale just to give the audience some context of the scale that you're operating at today, the growth that you're seeing.

**Dennis Thankachan** (3:10)
Sure. Today, we have raised over 65 million in capital, I can share. We have over 400 enterprise customers, including a number of the Fortune 50 and a few in the Fortune 10 that are really large names that utilize Lightyear to manage their networks. And today, with ISPs in particular, the vendors like the AT&T's, Lumen, ZEOS, etc. of the world, we're on the advisory boards or the number one channel partner for, I think, four out of the top 10 US ISPs, meaning we're driving so much volume for them in the context of business activity that places us either at the top channel partner or advisor type level.

**Brett** (3:56)
Talk to us about, it doesn't have to be the first, but maybe an early enterprise logo that you're able to land. You don't have to tell us who it was, but tell us the story about how you landed that. I know getting the first few enterprise logos is never easy.

**Dennis Thankachan** (4:08)
Sure. The earliest enterprise that we worked with was a company called Roadrunner Transportation. This was prompted really in the heat of COVID. We were initially going to be a platform that helped SMBs identify internet connectivity for office spaces primarily. Then COVID happened and for one, SMBs were going bankrupt and then people were, at the time, saying that no one will ever work in an office again. So that business idea didn't seem particularly fruitful. However, the thing that changed in COVID was enterprises were all across the globe, basically figuring out how to cut cost because economic activity went to zero, and also looking at re-architecting their network for what was going to be a shift from office-based activity to hybrid or in some cases, not office-based activity. So there were many enterprises that were willing to entertain startups in ways that they previously were not able to, and that was an opportunity because ultimately the vision was to go enterprise. It's just we knew that there was quite a bit of product we had to build before we had something that was enterprise passable. So we ended up being able to get embedded within a number of enterprises in the logistics face via connections that we had. One in particular I'll name as Roadrunner that became a long time customer of ours.