How Ooma got its name and other stories to celebrate the company’s 20th birthday

It’s not common in your life, unless you have a child, that something you started 20 years ago is still around. So I want to congratulate everyone at Ooma on the company’s 20th birthday in 2023.

This seems like a good time to share a few stories about Ooma’s origin.

In the beginning

The story starts in the spring of 2001 in Milpitas, California, not far from Ooma’s current headquarters in Sunnyvale. I was working at a startup tech company called Procket Networks.

One day, a 21-year-old young man walked into my office with spiked bleached blonde hair and skater clothes. He was eating an English muffin and he walked up to me and, without introducing himself, said, “I hear you’re the best sales guy around.”

That was how I met Andrew Frame, Ooma’s other co-founder. We became kindred spirits because we looked at the world in similar ways, especially at the opportunities then emerging with the introduction of home high-speed internet service.

In 2002, I moved to another startup called Trapeze Networks in Pleasanton, California, and brought Andrew with me. The two of us eventually got bored with service provider and enterprise networking, the focus of Procket and Trapeze, and we started brainstorming new ideas in my office. We’d bring in lunch, close the blinds and start whiteboarding different ideas.

We ultimately decided to start a company to offer free long-distance calling as a beachhead to building something bigger that would bring in revenue. (For those too young to remember, phone companies used to charge per-minute fees for long-distance calls in the days before mobile phones and the internet changed everything.)

Andrew and I made the rounds of Silicon Valley venture capitalists in early 2003 and got seed funding for a company we initially called Explore Networks.

In August 2003, we assembled a team in an outbuilding at my home in Alamo, California, that I call “Studio C.” I went to Costco and bought a folding table as our first piece of office furniture. Then we brought on board several engineers with experience in telecommunications and even a head of human resources. Everyone except Andrew and I came from the phone company. What better way to disrupt telephony than to bring the people that built the existing network:)?

Napster for phones

Our small team got to work ideating what we called “Napster for phones.” (Again, for those too young to remember, Napster was a service that let consumers upload and share songs from their CD collections – much to the displeasure of the copyright-obsessed music industry).

The concept worked like this: If I’m in San Francisco and I want to call my friend Eric in New York, I would pick up the phone and dial that number, starting with New York’s 212 area code. My Ooma device would detect a long-distance call and route the call to Ooma’s cloud service. Ooma would then look for an Ooma customer in New York and use that customer’s phone to complete the call to Eric. This bypassed the regular long-distance phone network with its unwelcome fees. Kind of a crazy idea, looking back on it now.

We signed incorporation papers for Explore Networks on November 19, 2003, the date I regard as Ooma’s birthday.

Finding the right name

Fast forward to early 2004. We knew we needed a punchy name for the company that would be easy for consumers to remember. Explore Networks or ExploreTel was never going to do it.

We sat down for an initial lunch meeting with a public relations agency in Palo Alto to explain our idea and see if we could be a good fit for each other. Doing that dance.

We began talking about our need for a new name. The hypothesis back then was a good company name needed just two syllables and one of those syllables should be the “oo” sound – like Yahoo and Google.

Someone said, just making casual conversation, “Hey, did you see that new Quentin Tarantino movie? It’s called ‘Kill Bill’ and the star is Uma Thurman.”

Andrew and I looked at each other at the same time. “That’s it! It’s Ooma!” Of course, we weren’t going to spell it with a “U.” That would be somebody’s name.

I can also clear up a common misperception. Although I wish it were true, we didn’t choose the name Ooma because it stands for “Object Of My Affection.” But it’s a nice coincidence.

About this time, we brought in Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, the founders of Napster, as advisors. Who better than the Napster guys if you’re doing Napster for phones? (Sean Parker went on to become the first president of Facebook and was played by Justin Timberlake in the 2010 movie “The Social Network”).

Also at this time, Ooma moved to its first real office at the corner of 2nd and Brannan Streets in San Francisco. We got a really good deal on the rent because the office had just been vacated by a podcasting company called Odeo run by Evan Williams, who went on to become a co-founder of Twitter.

Changing direction

Then the ground began to shift under our feet. The emergence of mobile phones, as well as early internet-based phone services, caused the big phone companies to back away from long-distance fees and instead offer flat calling rates.

I wanted to move Ooma in a different direction than the investors, but they had more conviction than I did in the plan, so I decided to leave in early 2005.

In the classic Silicon Valley tradition of starting a company with one idea then pivoting to another, Ooma eventually found success with internet-based home phone service and later with communications services for businesses.

At home, I still have the original Ooma phone device, launched in 2010, to remember how the company got started. Congratulations again to everyone at Ooma for growing a company that has thrived for two decades.