Founding Stories, Part III: Lessons Learned From Aereo, Reflections from our COO Alex Moulle-Berteaux

“When you’re in this kind of David and Goliath journey, 你真的想建立一家公司，从上到下，专注于为客户提供比业内任何人都更好的服务.” –AMB

Launching a successful, ground-breaking tech company is never easy. 这样做两次(在最高法院第一次叫停之后)似乎几乎是不可能的, 除非你有一个伟大的团队，能够在这个过程中吸取正确的教训.

Alex Moulle-Berteaux, Chief Operating Officer (COO) for Starry, is one of 20 founding members of Starry that previously worked for Aereo. He joined the upstart OTT service by way of Rockstar Games, where he served as Global Head of Marketing, and before that Media Arts Lab/ Chiat Day, 在那里，他与当时的苹果首席执行官史蒂夫·乔布斯密切合作，负责苹果所有产品的全球营销活动.

Inspired by the groundbreaking entrepreneurs he had been working with, Moulle-Berteaux决定拓展业务，寻找一个成熟的团队，他们正在做一些令人兴奋的事情, one where his commercial, marketing and customer focus experience could be additive.  By the time he hooked up with Chet, Joe and the team at Aereo, the engineering strategy, 这家新兴公司的法律和商业战略已经到位.

“他们都有创业经验、技术和工程经验. What they were doing was groundbreaking and potentially history-making, so I was excited to join up and contribute to the effort,” said Moulle-Berteaux.

Bringing Aereo to market, at a time when streaming services were still nascent, would require additional innovation, beyond the technical, to shift consumer behavior. Basically, 其目标是教会消费者如何(以及他们能够)以新的和不同的方式消费内容.

“A lot of our work was on, 你对客户的看法与现有公司有何不同?’” said Moulle-Berteaux, 谁在很大程度上负责制定Aereo的全国市场战略. “我们对客户的热情来自于我们的工作，这区分了我们作为颠覆者和现有服务的区别. When you’re in this kind of David and Goliath journey or battle, 你真的想建立一家公司，从上到下，专注于为客户提供比业内任何人都更好的服务.”

“As a team, 我们花了很多时间在流媒体硬件和移动设备上开发用户体验,” said Moulle-Berteaux.  “We understood what content was watched synchronously and asynchronously; and we wanted to make live TV more compelling.”

The plan worked. Aereo grew exponentially in a short amount of time, 证明团队的技术专长和客户体验重点是正确的. But when you’re a modern day David (Aereo), 与现代的歌利亚(广播公司)较量可不像挥舞弹弓那么容易——尤其是当歌利亚带来一大批律师的时候.

尽管Aereo的故事并没有以我们许多人(包括我们的订户)想要的方式结束, this “anti-incumbent” approach to delivering service, 除了从技术角度帮助消费者更好地理解家庭宽带服务的重要性之外, 成为星空发展中从Aereo学到的最重要的基础经验, said Moulle-Berteaux.

“At Aereo, 我们当时正在提供一个电视流媒体产品，有客户会打电话给我们说，‘你们的服务不工作了，或者正在缓冲.’但实际上，这是他们当时的极速赛车正规官网开奖网址服务。. “Latency, wifi performance, the ultimate service experience of what people cared about, 所有这些理解都来自于向12个市场的数十万人提供我们的电视流媒体服务.”

For Moulle-Berteaux and the rest of the Starry founding team, Aereo的经验证明，宽带市场存在着需要解决的严重低效问题. As the early concept for Starry began to take shape, everything from naming the company, to pricing, to delivery, technology – and yes, 顾客体验——是在为顾客提供更好服务的热情下发展起来的.  

“We looked at every aspect from sign up, plan presentation, install scheduling, wifi speed testing, 对客户的关怀，以及我们如何支持极速赛车正规官网开奖网址服务和联网设备的各个方面,” said Moulle-Berteaux.

The team focused early on in creating transparency for the service. And importantly, creating a service platform with end-to-end control, 所以他们在客户体验到服务性能问题之前就知道了.  确保这种服务的透明度和服务质量是第一天的核心目标.

星空传媒能够以令人难以置信的速度执行其战略，在很大程度上要归功于其创始团队的规模和专业知识. Together, 他们代表了多个学科，他们在Aereo的共同经验为他们推出更大的项目提供了帮助, more complex endeavor.

“The founding team was excited about the work we did at Aereo, very disappointed in the outcome, and motivated to do something even more ambitious and more impactful next,” Moulle-Berteux said. “我们之所以能做到这一点，是因为我们拥有一套独特的技能.”

如今，星空公司的创始团队仍然领导着公司的一些业务领域, a testament to the passion and commitment that drove Aereo’s early success. That continuity in leadership, and the ability to build on the lessons learned from Aereo, 允许团队从一开始就对业务的各个方面有一个清晰的愿景. 这反过来又促进了该公司自在波士顿推出初始服务以来的加速增长.

By fall 2015, Starry was already selling its newly developed, proprietary WiFi router (Starry Station) on Amazon, just one year after the company’s founding. By late 2017, a mere 3 years from the start of R&D, 该公司开始为试用客户提供授权毫米波频谱(曾经被认为是“不可用”的频谱)，使用星空团队从头开始的内部技术. Today, Starry’s service covers more than 5.3 million homes in six major markets, 根据扩张路线图，该公司将进入全国4000多万户家庭.

“We weren’t constantly reinventing and pivoting, like a lot of other start-ups,” Moulle-Berteaux said of Starry’s early days. “For a tech company, 我们最初的几年非常富有成效，因为我们对自己想要实现的目标有一个清晰的认识.”

For Moulle-Berteaux, 以这种势头创办一家公司，意味着有能力可靠地追逐最大、最不平衡的行业之一，并利用技术解决使宽带公司在美国形成近乎垄断的障碍.

“The end of Aereo was difficult, but it set into motion this next great chapter,” said Moulle-Berteaux. “我坚信，你从失败中学到的东西比从成功中学到的要多——关键是把你学到的东西记在心里，不要重蹈覆辙。.”

Alex’s Lessons Learned: Key Takeaways

• Passion for the customer is critical
• 从第一天起就制定雄心勃勃的客户体验原则，并坚持下去
• 专注于最大的行业挑战，为你的公司提供持久的竞争优势:而不是寻找你的利基
• Failure is not always the end of the road
• The people you work with matter - choose wisely