goTenna V1 (MURS)

The original flavor. El original! The OG papa. The goTenna.

The concept for goTenna came to me in the summer of 2012 while at the Electric Daisy Carnival festival in Las Vegas. After going to so many music festivals in that period of my life, I had become increasingly frustrated with how unreliable cell network were when too many people congregated in one place. In a crowd of tens or hundreds of thousands, you only had to get distracted for a second before you lost your crew with little hope of finding them again.

At first I tried to solve the problem by using off-the-shelf products, primarily walkie-talkies which were a disaster. Not only were they synchronous but they were also audio-based, which wasn’t ideal for loud environments. I also found I wasn’t the only person trying to use this potential solution, so channels were just jammed with chatter, rendering them near useless.

As I was contemplating my frustration with the situation, I found myself wishing I could just text. I didn’t need to talk. Text and location pins would do the job. What I wanted was a “walkie-textie,” which I’m so glad was not the name chosen for the company - but I confess it was briefly considered.

I didn’t have a background in RF or any kind of formal engineering beyond lifelong tinkering, but it occurred to me that if old-school internet modems could send data over audio channels, why couldn’t I do the same with regular walkie-like frequencies and just pair them with my phone?

Although this was a radical oversimplification of the task at hand, and a gross underselling of the complexity of what the goTenna system is, fundamentally, that was my original design and after spending a few weeks validating the concepts with professors at my nearby alma mater, I knew I had something that was not only possible - but that it could be Big - with a capital B. During my due diligence into what I might be building, I realized that any legacy radio-user might be interested in this - particularly the multi-billion dollar public safety and military markets.

In the midst of trying to convince my sister to co-found the company with me in late 2012, Hurricane Sandy hit and drove home the fragility of modern telecommunications networks for everyone. With that salient event in mind, and some irreplaceable support from our family, we were able to corral sufficient momentum with a janky set of prototypes to raise our Series Seed with Brooklyn Bridge Ventures and start a wild ride that continues to this day. Today, goTenna Inc. employs nearly 100 people and is backed by some of the biggest names in venture capital in the world as it produces the world’s smallest, lightest, and most affordable communications systems for smartphones.

The goTenna V1 is now discontinued, superseded by the goTenna Mesh product which can be found at goTennaMesh.com.