Perseverance and Community Are Keys to Success For Punit Shah
Punit Shah is an entrepreneur, researcher, and consultant with an impressive resume that includes engineering, UX, marketing and developments in stroke rehabilitation. Shah earned his Bachelor’s degree in 2003 from UC Irvine’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) and went on to earn his Masters in Computer Science at Harvard University. Subsequently, he co-founded CallFire, now EZTexting, a company providing text-based marketing services, that is now the number one in the industry. Outside of his company, Shah leads a youth group teaching young people how to run a nonprofit, and, more broadly, is passionate about work that serves people’s long term happiness. At the heart of all Shah’s experience and expertise is an unflappable commitment to community and relationships – and a belief that anything is possible if you’re willing to persevere.
“I’m not self-made,” Shah says when asked about the journey to his current success. “I have a lot of gratitude for the folks who have been alongside me. It’s tough when you’re trying to do something nobody believes in yet – support and relationships are key.” Speaking about his induction into the ICS Hall of Fame, Shah emphasized: “Moments like this are community made, team made, family made. I’m a reflection of really great people in my life that have supported me and kept my confidence high.”
Tell me a bit about your background. When did your interest in computer science and information technology start?
Well, when I was three, I got meningitis, and I lost complete mobility from my head down. I had to work through physical therapy to get mobility back. And as a young kid, you have aspirations of sports – I really liked basketball – and my dad, he was very up front, he told me, I don’t think you’re gonna win with your body. I think you’re gonna win with your mind. So the computer was a natural progression of that lesson. I remember getting a Commodore 64 when I was eight years old, and I started coding, started editing video games and files and stuff like that, and it just became something that I did for fun.
You earned a degree in Computer Science at UC Irvine – tell me about that experience. What stood out to you about your education at UCI? How do you feel your ICS education contributed to where you are now?
So, I grew up in Cerritos, and I had a cousin who went to UCI and used to bring me around and show me the campus. UC Irvine was my first choice schooI. I met a bunch of my co-founders there, a really good group of friends, and we all learned from each other. That was a really significant part of my success, the friends I made at UC Irvine. TJ, my co-inductee, was actually my TA. We had a lot of fun together and we ended up building a business together later.
My co-founders and I, we started maybe four or five businesses during college. We’d have this really great idea, then we’d build it and it wouldn’t work or would fall apart. Over time we learned it wasn’t the idea – it was really the people you were with and the execution of the idea and how you evolved, how you overcame failure, how you kept the pedal down even when you didn’t want to, or when other priorities kept came up. We got really good at figuring out who we were and what made a good team.
Talk to me more about your professional experience after UC Irvine, when you reconnected with your friends from college and built what would eventually become CallFire. How did that happen?
Well, we got the team right eventually, and started as a consulting company. We were just taking Craigslist jobs, and landed in this niche of doctors and lawyers offices wanting digital phones. We became one of the first organizations to be an approved vendor for a thing called Asterisk, which was an open source VoIP software that we had the expertise in how to install. We could install this software and save these offices tons of money because they used to have to buy a server to run everything.
Then, for one project, we were working with this huge call center and just couldn’t get the phone lines to work. The main issue was, we were dealing with other people’s technology – the company’s internet provider and telecom provider, their cards and devices. This was still before the cloud existed. We said, can’t we just put this all online and use our stuff? Can’t they just get everything set up under our service? So we started a new company with a great system where you could get phone lines set up and make and answer calls, and I came up with the name CallFire.
As soon as we had the brand to get behind, we knew it was going to be something big. We’d invested enough time in the technology to understand it. It just seemed to take off from there – that year we went from I think negative 20 grand in revenue to two million, and all because we had this failure where we were like, We don’t want to do this anymore. We don’t want to go to a call center and install stuff and get billed for the hour. We want to build software and support people in using it.
So lots of struggle there. I mean, we’ve screwed up so many times, but it’s just perseverance, and being intelligent enough to overcome obstacles and be innovative with each other. And a big focus of mine is always to keep the team together. For me, that was the mission from the beginning. That [team dynamic] was a big part of the success. We had each other’s backs. We had this phrase: we’re candid and then we commit. We expressed our honest feelings on whatever was going on, and then just committed to a plan to move forward together – and it worked.
Tell me a little more about the journey from CallFire to EZTexting.
We were doing our work with CallFire, and we suddenly had a slew of customers that wanted answering machine detection. So we built it, but we started wondering why so many people wanted it.
Well – the iPhone had just come out, and it had caller ID, and visual voicemail, where you can read the voicemail as it’s coming in. So you get an unknown call, you let it go to voicemail. That was happening in droves. So we’re like, what do we do? This is ruining our business of having a voice [marketing] company. How do we get good communication mechanisms for businesses and consumers to talk to each other using the phone? Texting was the only app that was pre-installed on every single iPhone. We had this crystal ball, really – data showed us the path. We could see answer rates on phone calls dropping, and we knew something was going to be next. We acquired EZTexting really early, in 2012, and five years later texting really took off [as a marketing service], and from there CallFire blew up. We changed the name to EZTexting in 2017, and the business continues to grow.
You also contributed to significant advancements in stroke rehab technology while at UC Irvine as a software engineer in 2004. Can you tell me how you got involved in that?
Yes – there is another ICS Hall of Fame inductee, Robert Sanchez, who was inducted for that apparatus. It’s now commercially viable, and companies are using the licensing.
This is another example of how community helps so much. When I graduated in 2003, I was struggling on the job market, so I shared with my friends that I was looking for work. Eventually one of my buddies said he’d heard about this opportunity in UCI’s biomedical engineering department, where they’re working on stroke rehab. I had a job offer from Microsoft and a couple other opportunities at that point, but I felt like this was a chance to give back in a way, or a chance to work on something I’m really affected by. So I went to work with Dr. Reinkensmeyer and Dr. Robert Sanchez. Brilliant guys. They were building an apparatus that, as I’d describe it, alleviated the effects of gravity on a person’s body. They were testing whether neural connectedness was lost after a stroke, or if it was muscle atrophy. They were able to prove that it was mostly muscle atrophy – there was maybe some neurological stuff, but generally mobility could be regenerated with exercise.
The cool part is – the way I interpret the study, Dr. Sanchez and Dr. Reinkensmeyer might say it differently – we put people in this device to use in our clinic, people who were really affected, some for like 14 years, who had had their arms stuck in a position, for example. But in this device, all of a sudden they can do a circle with their arm. At the end of the study, six or eight weeks, they could write their name in the air. That’s how much fidelity they had. We were giving them their mobility back. But for me, the really interesting part was the control group we sent home with exercises. The same amount of time and exercises at home, without the device – and they came back with similar results.
The way that I describe that is: the apparatus is great – it gets people motivated to do the work, because they see immediate gain. But sometimes you have to work in the dark. Sometimes you just need to continue to work despite not seeing progress, because you are learning and you are gaining something every single day. Even if you don’t see it. Similar to me, right? I worked every single day to get my mobility back. I didn’t see progress every day. But I was working on building the muscles to get to the place where I could be in the next phase. So that study put a double stamp on things I had learned myself, and validated that it’s time, effort, and perseverance that gets you to success.
Are there any applications of EZ Texting that you find especially exciting? I was interested to see the case study about Ohio Technical College’s use of the service to boost enrollment.
There’s so many interesting things. We did a study with Fannie Mae where they ran a test with people with missing mortgage payments. They gave one group a discounted mortgage rate, and then with the control group, all they did was text them and remind them to pay their bill. Which one do you think resulted in more people paying their bill? It was the group that had been texted with a reminder. People want to do what they’re supposed to, but they’re so distracted – the client just had to get to them in an intimate way or a way they would notice. So reminding people of things, we could call it nudging, seems to be important. That’s one study.
Another one was early age learning. The company that worked with us took people across a demographic set, and texted the parents every day with phrases to say to their child: A is for apple, B is for bear. Just a reminder to repeat these phrases to their kid every day. That’s all we did, and it showed something like a 30% higher literacy rate at age five, just by doing that. We were able to positively affect the literacy rate of 5-year-old kids because we were in at that early age. That’s really cool to me.
Your company rolled out some AI features last year. Could you talk about how implementing AI has been for your company, and your thoughts on the future of its use of this area of industry?
We have mountains of data, right? Twenty years of texting data, where we’ve seen what’s successful and what’s not. We can now train AI to help our customers send better messages that mean more to the end consumer. We can think about timing now, like when something should be sent. So with those sorts of things, we’re using AI a bit. The eventual goal is, can AI be a companion to a business to create the right interaction on its own? If a customer reaches out to customer care and needs support, can you have a full blown conversation using AI, and give them better support than with a remote team abroad? Can you give them better service, and also bring a human in the loop when needed? We don’t want to give AI free reign. We’d like AI to have human intervention standards. So if the AI invents a flow of text messages or a particular message, we want a human to verify before sending it – those human elements are valuable, even while we’re implementing AI. We view it as a super suit instead of as taking over. It makes everybody stronger.
Another thing that could be interesting in the long run is determining how an individual would like a text message, like how I would like to receive a message versus how you might like to. Right now we’re doing generics – eventually we’ll get to hyper-personalized, it’ll speak to you the way that you’d like to be spoken to. That’s another cool development that could be the future – personalized texting.
Outside of your role at EZ Texting and the other work we’ve discussed, where do you find yourself most inspired? What draws your attention outside of your main gigs?
One of my main passions is relationships – understanding the power relationships play in success and happiness and quality of life. Some of the stuff I’m exploring is around, how can we get better at helping people that feel alone, that feel unrecognized in life? Technology’s just making it much worse. You’re now just sitting there scrolling on your phone and not interacting with anybody. Can we deliver happiness in a better way? So, [I’m interested in] tools that are focused on that, that are rewarding to people and actually help them overcome struggles. Everybody struggles with contentment and happiness. I really want to harness the power of relationships to make the world a happier place. Sort of a big mission and probably sounds a little crazy at the moment, but I’m all for it.
So that’s what I’m working on these days. I’m taking advisor roles, that kind of stuff. I also run a youth group in the South Bay where I teach kids how to run a nonprofit. Along with a board, I show them how to run a board meeting, what governance is, how to create an event and budget for it. I get to coach them through running a company in some ways. They’re so awesome, a really great group of kids.
Can you tell me a little bit about what it means to you to be inducted into the ICS Hall of Fame?
It’s such an honor, such a privilege. I’m very thankful for the recognition. There’s some real greats from the ICS Hall of Fame. So to be in the same group is pretty amazing. And as I said, it’s a moment that’s community-made, team-made, family-made.
UC Irvine is full of young, excited innovators hoping to create paths like yours and find their own successful spaces. What would you say to them?
First and foremost, it’s to keep going. It’s to not give up. Because literally anything you want can happen. You have to persevere, and you have to be intelligent about perseverance. You have to learn from mistakes and then keep going. Don’t keep doing the same thing the same way, but learn, and just keep one foot in front of the other.
Another thing is that the people around you matter a lot. Having people in your life that push you to be better are invaluable. So, recognize the people that show up for you whenever you need them. Keep people around you who help promote what you want in life, and who challenge you. The strength of community is such a big deal. There are two times in your life where you meet the most people – in school, and after you have kids. In school is where you forge the best and longest standing friendships you’ll have in your life. So for students in school right now – those relationships matter. The friends you’re making when you’re in school can take you a long way. My friends from UCI and I got together after we graduated to start that company. After we all took jobs and did other things. So don’t miss the chance in school to form a community and make those connections.
– Jenna Abrams