Building Skylo: Parth Trivedi’s lessons in scaling a global network

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Mistakes are inevitable when building a company, especially in the industries we intersect — where founders are building novel technologies and tackling ambitious problems that not long ago were considered unsolvable. But after years of supporting companies through the early stages of growth, we’ve found that not all mistakes are created equal. Many mistakes are common and possible to avoid with the right insights and industry expertise, while some mistakes are wholly original. These are the mistakes we strive to understand and learn from.

An original mistake is not only unique to a particular company or situation but, sometimes, wholly new to an industry. These mistakes may evolve with an industry, surprising even the most seasoned entrepreneurs.

In this series, we’ve invited industry disruptors and entrepreneurs to share their original mistakes – the stories behind them, the lessons learned, and the wisdom gained. By sharing these experiences, we hope to provide insights for current and future founders, entrepreneurs, and technologists.

This week’s guest is Parth Trivedi, CEO and co-founder of Skylo. Parth is a brilliant entrepreneur with whom we intersected during his Stanford GSB days. After a rigorous Research Driven Ideation process and Innovation Endeavors incubation, Parth launched Skylo, a global non-terrestrial network provider offering satellite connectivity across data, SMS, and voice calls.

With a background in aerospace, what made you want to pursue entrepreneurship? Why not NASA or academia?

I'm one of Scott's former [Stanford GSB] students. And I'm also an aerospace engineer from MIT. I spent some time working on DOD-funded projects at MIT and then came to Stanford, where I had the opportunity to do my MBA under Scott's guidance, participate in the aerospace department, and collaborate with Professor Andrew Kalman — one of the original pioneers of the CubeSat. We formed a group with Tarun Gupta from Google and Andrew Nuttall, who was finishing his PhD at Stanford. We were frustrated by the fact that satellite communications was so expensive. So, we decided to work on the problem of making connectivity ubiquitous. How do we make connectivity accessible to everyone in a cost-effective, highly scalable way that can reach billions of people?

I became an entrepreneur because my drive in life has always been to do what gives me goosebumps. The topic of space is definitely one that gives me goosebumps. The ability to use space for the benefit of mankind has been something that gets me out of bed every day.

Building something of your own and doing what you enjoy every single day allows you to live in the most fulfilling way possible.

Skylo was born from a Research Driven Ideation (RDI) framework process. What was that like for you?

Research Driven Ideation is a process of meticulous elimination where you question every aspect of the hypotheses you started with. First, you try to prove or disprove the market. You interview people; you don't just assume things. You actually go and talk to people, customers, and work to understand if your hypothesis is valid. A large part of this process is overcoming confirmation bias.

So, the whole RDI process is designed to get you to find a potential market fit early and build an incredible product and team. We used to have these sprints where Scott would ask me to talk to industry stakeholders and validate whether an idea was legit or not, and I used to come back with data from many conversations with industry experts. One of the benefits of being at Stanford is you can literally reach out to anyone you want with a 90% plus success rate.

Then, once we had landed on an idea, we had to test it and see whether it wouldn’t work. So, we reached out to experts. In fact, I had a call with someone in the Horizon X office at Boeing when we were first exploring Skylo. I said, “Hey, we have this idea, but why don't you tell us why it won't work? Prove us wrong.” So, they sent in their best technical expert from El Segundo, spent a week with us going deep inside our tech, our assumptions, and so on, and they ended up investing in Skylo in the first round that we raised. Scott will say this perhaps better than I can, but we tried to kill the idea many different times, and it wouldn't die.

I imagine your early research helped you tackle challenges, like navigating company growth during COVID, a tough time for even experienced leaders. How was that experience for you?

COVID was a very tumultuous time because it was hard to separate what was an idiosyncratic versus systemic signal. How do you separate away the noise and understand how customers are truly reacting to your service or product, in one of the most volatile periods? That’s hard, right?

You might be selling a product to a market that temporarily has to hunker down and isn't interested in buying your particular widget. I'm not speaking specifically about Skylo, but I think COVID was a time when some products were clearly in need. It was a bit of ambulance chasing, and then there were just a lot of founders who had to wait it out patiently.

For Skylo, those two years were a lesson in decisiveness. And I will say that it was not really because of or in spite of COVID. COVID simply made decision-making complex because you have to handle the ups and downs of what's happening in the world and the market, along with what's happening in your company.

Whenever you're operating in an environment where you need to move quickly and attack a huge opportunity, you have to make decisions very swiftly. You can’t spend too much time in analysis paralysis. I'm not saying you shouldn’t get the best data possible, but once you do that, you have to make a call even if you don't have everything figured out.

Is there a moment where you acted decisively that stands out for you?

When we were looking at the market for connectivity, the Internet of Things and enterprise really stood out as an early opportunity that we could go after. And we had built an incredible network. We had hired an amazing team, and we had built these incredible capabilities where you could use cellular technologies to connect devices over satellite. The assumption was that if we wanted to move quickly and take control of this opportunity, we needed to build the hardware ourselves and build more of the customer-facing tech stack ourselves. That was one of the original mistakes that we made. But at the time, it felt like the right strategy.

We wanted to prove out the market, to scale it, and be in control of our own destiny, rather than relying on the ecosystem. But the reality is that hardware is hard. Supply chains are very frail, especially in light of COVID, which is exactly what happened to us. Our lead times were more than two years at one point! We also realized that the industry can innovate and build hardware and scale much faster than Skylo could individually as a single company, especially as a small company.

‍So, we decisively pivoted. We decided to focus on successful partnerships.

We wanted to understand how to successfully partner with others. We asked ourselves, how do you build an ecosystem rather than trying to do everything yourself? How do you take a customer-facing component of your business and allow others to go to market with the devices, modules, and the chipsets that now proliferate the market but with Skylo’s connectivity?

And to do that required an insane amount of perseverance, grit, resilience, and smarts. We employed guerilla tactics in the beginning. You won't believe the number of LinkedIn outreaches that I did to chipset makers and module vendors. We had identified a list of the top OEMs that we wanted to go after. But establishing a single partnership with a big company is hard. And establishing multiple partnerships with multiple big corporations at every level of the stack in order to make your service successful is insanely hard.

Sounds incredibly daunting.

Yes, but step one is to surround yourself with an incredible team. I can't stress that enough. When you have the right folks on your team who have successfully collaborated with big companies in the past, they get it.

I had my co-founder, Tarun, on my team. He had worked at Google before. He knew what it was like to partner with big companies and the kind of expectations that they set. We had Andrew, who's my CTO and co-founder, probably the most brilliant person I've met. And it's because of the intellect that he brings that even the largest corporations have respect for our work. So when you combine perseverance with actual high-quality work, it gets noticed. If you just have perseverance but you don't bring actual quality, that's a recipe for disaster.

And word spreads very quickly amongst these companies. Good work creates a virtuous cycle. That's the network effect of working with chipset companies that then dovetails into modules that then dovetails into devices, and then ultimately carriers. You've really got to deliver. You have to do what you said you were going to do.

‍Reputation management is so important.

A large corporation seems vast, but they do communicate with each other. They also communicate at every level of their own organization. So, internally, I call it flying at all altitudes.

You've got to identify all the decision-makers, all the influencers, and all the stakeholders within your target company, and you've got to fly at all altitudes, meaning you can't just work at the very top. You have to ensure that you have technically satisfied each stakeholder.

‍So, partnerships with the likes of Verizon and Google allowed you to expand and grow your business monumentally. What started as a pivot because of the “original mistake” of going it alone led to something incredible.

One hundred percent. It allowed us to learn the requirements. It positioned us very successfully to work with the ecosystem, and it revealed this huge opportunity that became a flywheel. Then it became unstoppable as we knocked down partnership after partnership.

Here again, you've got to be decisive. Once you have that lightbulb moment, don’t let the opportunity get away from you.

‍At this point, you’ve become a seasoned founder. Was there a piece of advice that you received early in your career that was especially valuable when starting out?  

Momentum is so important. The best time to get started was yesterday, and the second best time to get started is today. When we started Skylo as an example, we didn't start it as a company. We started it as a research project at Stanford. The very act of putting your mind and your hands on something and following through with it will lead to the outcome that you want. But if you sit around and wait too long, you won't get it.

‍How does it compare to lead Skylo today versus when you were just starting out?

The things that held true when we started the company are still some of the things that hold true today. I like to see my individual success through the collective success of my team. And that is true today. Nothing makes me more proud than to see what my teams achieve every single day. My job is to give them the best resources possible and in most cases, to get the hell out of their way, and make sure we continue to set a high bar for culture in the company. Along with setting a clear strategy for the next three to five years, that's most of what I spend my time on.

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