Mo Nezarati makes the tough problems of voice tech look easy.
As President of Voice at Subspace, Mo is driven by creating simple, frictionless, and elegant solutions for his customers.
An entrepreneur at heart, Mo shares his proudest achievement, and the formula for creating wide adoption and delighting customers. Mo has always been a Trekkie, so Warp speed ahead to learn more about him!!
Q&A with Mo:
Share a bit about the coolest thing you’ve worked on since you joined Subspace.
To be honest, it’s all been cool. We’re redefining how the internet handles real-time communications and we are reimagining the ways systems and users interact at the network level. Most of my experience has been in creating and defining applications and solutions, so doing this in a completely new way, in the network, is exciting.
What’s your favorite part of what you do? Why do you like it?
I aim to create solutions that are simple to consume, and I’m particularly impressed by the solutions that our Subspace engineering team is building. It’s a highly elegant solution to a very difficult problem. I’m fortunate to work with a group of supremely talented engineers who aren’t fazed by the most challenging of problems and work towards finding solutions for them.
I find it very satisfying to see wide adoption of our solutions. I strive to delight customers with our products. To me, that’s the most satisfying part of building products - seeing them adopted and appreciated.
Which problem with the current public internet are you most excited to solve? Why?
The public internet isn’t built for real-time applications and real-time traffic. Lots of technology has been created to solve it, but these are mostly workarounds and not solutions. I’m excited to be working on real solutions to this problem. Real-time applications will play a larger and more important role in our lives and a network built specifically for it will be important to these applications.
Describe your work-from-home set-up.
I work from two locations. The first is an office-den with:
- Two large monitors
- My laptop
- Two cameras
- A wired speaker
(As well as noise-canceling earphones and lots of light.)
I also have an outdoor patio where I like to work during warmer months. I enjoy being outdoors and try to be outside as much as possible. When I’m outside, I use my iPad Pro as a second monitor using Apple’s Sidecar feature.
What’s something that’s a must-have for your workspace?
Light. I find working in bright spaces to be more productive for me.
What music (if any) do you listen to while you work?
I’m pretty diverse with my music. My go-to music choices are 70s and 80s rock: Dire Straits, Rolling Stones, Queen, Supertramp. But I also enjoy Bob Marley and even some newer artists like Stromae, who is a Belgian rapper.
If someone were to meet you at a conference, what conference would that most likely be?
For work, I would most likely be seen at a communications conference, such as Enterprise Connect. However, being a Trekkie, don’t be surprised if you see me at a Star Trek convention too!
If you were presenting at a conference, which Subspace colleague would you want to present on stage with you?
I enjoy presenting our solutions with our CTO, William King. We seem to blend a nice mix of deep tech knowledge from William with some business use cases and commercial needs from my side.
What podcast do you most love listening to, and which would you most like to be a guest on?
I listen to Reid Hoffman’s, “Masters of Scale” as well as Malcolm Gladwell’s, “Revisionist History.” Once we make Subspace the leader in its space, I’d love to speak with Reid Hoffman about the journey.
What past achievement are you especially proud of?
I founded my previous company Esna Technologies, and led the development of enterprise communication and collaboration solutions. I sold the company to Avaya in 2015. I’m most proud of the phenomenal team we had at Esna who were excellent and made me look good every day! I’m especially proud of their continued contributions to the companies they are now working with, including a few who have joined me at Subspace.
Do you have any published articles/books/interviews? Share links!
What did you want to be when you were a kid?
An astronaut. As a child of the 60s, I remember everyone gathering to watch the Apollo rockets launch and the moon landing. I also loved all the space shows, from Lost in Space to Star Trek. I still love the new iterations of these shows.
What did you study at University? Did you plan to be a Developer?
I studied Engineering at University of Toronto, but I didn’t actually plan on being a developer. When I founded Esna Technologies and needed to build our products. I then began the transformation into becoming a developer. However, in the past 10+ years, I have not actively coded as I have spent most of my time on business strategy and product architecture.
Tell us about the first real product you built or coded. (And no, "hello world" doesn’t count.)
Esna’s first product was a voicemail platform. The product has iterated much in the past 30 years and has become a communications platform of its own. It’s still being used in thousands of companies, with much of the code I generated still in production today. It’s likely that if you called a company and left a voicemail, it was my code.
Tell us something about yourself that would surprise most people.
I’ve traveled to 53 countries and have been to all continents except Antarctica, but I hope to get there soon! I also have studied 9 languages, and I can converse in 5 of them.
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