Tom Corker Interview
A current and future shareholders of BFC. I wanted to take another moment to introduce to you yet another board member here. I know all of you are getting to know me. Andrew Gilton again, who brought in Ac-Dc miners us. And as we've slowly progressed here, we are adding more people. And as we continue growing and growing, we we are going to introduce you to the key members of of our organization.
One of them is right here with us. His name is Tom Corker. I'm going to give him a few minutes to talk about his background. And but I wanted to share with you our story because it's a pretty, pretty ironic story. One day, I. I got a call from a guy who wanted to buy some miners that I was selling.
And it turns out that it was it was this this gentleman right here with us. And he was my first big customer. I remember I was so excited. You know, we we sold him a unit and then I don't know why, but we just started chatting. One day it was, Hey, how's it going? Hey, how's your miner working?
And then it became, Hey, I have this idea for for hosting. And, you know, we talked about it. And then he said came back to me a little bit and said, I think this idea might actually work and this that, that we didn't know back then, but that was the basis for our relationship going forward. And that happened last year.
And which leads us up to now and we have some very exciting things in front of us. Most of you will have seen that going on now, but I'll stop blabbering on and let Tom talk. Again, this is Tom Corker and Tom wants to give everybody a little bit of background on yourself. Cool. Thanks for having me on, Andrew.
I think first and foremost, I'm a I'm a start up junkie. I really enjoy building companies teams, especially when we can go compete against big, large, entrenched players in certain markets. I just love the maneuverability and speed of a startup. Having said that, I've been a part of five startup companies for in the telecommunications space and one in the artificial intelligence space.
And in total the companies generated about 10 billion in liquidity for investors and employees. So they've all been pretty successful. And that was all done through either IPO or acquisition. And simply put, what those companies did is build the current Internet. We sold to all the major service providers worldwide, examples of big companies like AT&T, Verizon and anyone with an interest in building high speed networks.
And chances are, if you're using the Internet or phone wires or wired, you're going over equipment designed by one of those companies. So that's a bit about my background. What else can I answer for you? Well, Tom, that is very impressive resume. I remember the first time you started to share some of that with me. I was just blown away.
And I continue to be blown away to this day. Now, everybody has seen our videos about Tom Allison and Jason Holcomb joining us. But in my videos, I know you've seen them and I just don't have the same technical expertise that you do. So I'm I'm wondering if you would take a few moments and just explain to everybody what what it is that they do and how they are such a vital part of our team.
Yeah, sure. I thought it was really interesting when you and I met because every company takes the yin and the yang and. And we sort of operate that way. You. You're sort of the the lead on the sales and customer engagement side. I've done a lot of start ups. I know how to build a business and a team.
But the bottom line is to create an operation like BFC, you need a couple of important skill sets. And one of those is you need somebody that knows their way around the data center. And they need to understand power. They need to understand cooling. They need to understand network and latency of the network. And they need to understand the whole aspects of really full redundancies and all those areas.
So in other words, you need a team that knows how to engineer, build and operate a data center. And next, you need somebody that really understands customer acquisition, retention and sales. And I think if you look at the team, Tom Ellis and Jason, they really know their way around the data center. They know all those areas. Like I said, you're great on the customer engagement side and the marketing side.
And then I've got that background in in startup companies and telecommunications, which kind of directly intersects with what Tom and Jason are doing. Well, and, you know, it's funny, I like to tell everybody how amazing our team is, but when you when you hear it in those terms coming out of your mouth, it really is a very unique group that we have and we're very, very fortunate.
Tom, Hey, listen, I really appreciate your time today. I know you're busy, but everybody welcome. Tom Parker to the to the board for BFC. H This is starting to get very exciting, and I'm very proud that we're able to bring people like Alison and Jason and Tom Hawker to the table so that we can help this company become more successful.