This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
Staff writer
(December 13, 2007) — Jeff Valentine thought he had hit the jackpot eight years ago when he started his dot-com business. Remember message boards? They are not used as much today, but Valentine thought he'd revolutionize the game by making "the Internet talk."
"Companies like Yahoo were going public and selling for ridiculous amounts of money," said Valentine of Fairport, who was 23 at the time. "We all thought we'd do the same in six months and make tons of money."
The young entrepreneur armed a team of "Internet geeks," most of them from Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A recent engineering graduate of Cornell, he started the company in Boston.
He gathered a lot of talent in starting to build the technology, but didn't quite know how to sell it.
The concept was simple: take the human voice, record it over the phone and transmit it through the Internet, a complement to the company's original name: BYO Broadcast, that stood for "Bring Your Own Broadcast," a dot-com name for a dotcom company, added Valentine.
The idea quickly attracted investors, especially one individual who heard the words audio and Web and thought it would take off like Napster.
Then there was the 2002 dot-com crash. The only way to salvage the company was to lay off those 35 brilliant new hires.
For a while it was just him and two other employees.
Feeling obligated to his investors, he rode out the storm and took what he had started technology-wise and evolved the software into a call management solution designed for small- to medium-sized call centers.
United Kingdom-based British Telecommunications was one of the first large accounts that jumped on the bandwagon and helped the company rebound. By that time the firm was named Callfinity.
In 2005, Valentine, a Penfield native, moved the company from Boston to Pittsford with help from New York State's Empire Zone program.
"I don't know why it's getting bad press ... because without this program we wouldn't have moved," said Valentine.
Through the program, Callfinity is essentially being paid a small stipend from the state to grow in Monroe County, where they employ 15.
Since landing the British Telecommunications account, Valentine said the company has experienced steady growth with positive cash flow.
The 31-year-old CEO did not disclose revenue for the company, but estimates that growth will ring in at a 100 percent increase over last year.
Callfinity has attracted more than 200 companies with its call center management software that offers users a variety of integrated telecommunication services that include voice over IP, pre-recorded prompts, statistics reporting and data retrieval, all of which can be hosted from the company's network center.
"It's a great way to get a lot of call-in features for a reasonable amount of money on an obsolete phone switch in our office," said Tim Scahill president of Rochester-based Layer 8 Group.
The software is considered crucial for training purposes. Call center jobs are often entry-level positions that have huge turnover.
Callfinity competes in a market with larger companies such as Nortel and Avaya. To remain competitive the company has to undersell the bigger players in most situations.
Valentine said he hopes to beef up his product set to gain more market share.
Growth is the top goal for the young CEO.
"Creating something out of nothing, then succeeding wildly at the beginning, failing miserably immediately after, and now trying to gain ground has been a real roller coaster for me," he said.
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
