When the Internet Breaks: Building Infrastructure Resilience with Edward Tsinovoi

We always manage the conversations regarding whether what we are building is nice to have for companies or must to have of the companies. So we invest a lot of thought in how we are building the product which will be the must have for the companies. How we are building the story which will be a must have for the companies. Hello everyone and welcome to Built Not Born, the Startup Go to Market podcast by Venture Guides.

I'm Sage Nye and around here we believe that great companies are built not born one smart decision at a time. Each week we take you through real conversations with founders, investors and go to market experts on what it really takes to land customers and scale your startup. Now let's get to work. Hello and welcome to Built Not Born, the podcast where we dive into the real stories behind startup execution, venture capital and go to market strategy.

I'm Sage Nye, Investing partner at Venture Guides. Today we are joined by Edward Sanovi, co founder and CEO of IO River. Eddie is a deep tech entrepreneur and infrastructure expert with 20 plus years building the backbone of the Internet. After leading engineering initiatives at companies like Akamai and Dell, he co founded IO river to redefine how content is delivered across the edge.

IO river is a next generation platform that is reimagining content delivery through virtual edge and multi edge infrastructure. Under his and Mickey's leadership, I.O. river is empowering businesses to leverage multiple Edge and CDM platforms to improve performance, increase resiliency and reduce costs, addressing some of the toughest challenges in modern application delivery and one that has impacted most of the Internet recently with the Cloudflare outage.

Edward, you and Mickey are examples of the best types of founders, ones that create a company because they've experienced the pain and they believe in building a better future. For any technologists who want to build a new future but don't know where to start, this is the episode for you. Eddie, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.

Hiroziu. I am so excited and we would love to start with a little bit of context for our audience. Can you share a bit about your and Mickey's story and why you decided to start I.O.

river? Sure. So actually the story of I.O.

river started when we left Akamai and in our last years in Akamai, especially in the last year in Akamai, we experienced something very unique. We decided at Akamai to froze the network, to froze the development and the development and the innovation on the network because we have experienced two worldwide outages, events similar to what we experienced in Cloudflare. You know, just Last month and these kind of events, you cannot avoid them. It happens.

It will happen to cloudflare, it will happen to Akamai, it will happen to any other vendor. Because if you want to do something, you might also do a mistake. But the cost of these mistakes is too high. And we realize at Akamai that it's that no matter which innovation we will try to bring into the network network, the risk and the cost of mistake is much higher than any outcome that will come from these innovations.

So we decided simply to freeze the network. Plasomenos came to the engineering and say, listen guys, you can go to the beach. It will be much better, much more profitable for Akamai. Then try to bring new content in.

And during the entire year, we froze the network. When we left Akamai and looked on the edge and on the delivery world. Today, with the innovations of AI, it's amazing how easy became to create a new content. We are actually facing a tsunami of digital content that should be distributed and delivered around the world.

However, the edge should support it. It cannot be frozen. And we decided that we should solve it. We should help to the world to reach the point that the edge is much more robust, much more resilient.

And from another side, we must allow the edge continue to develop in order to support the needs that we have today. Exactly. And this strikes me one thing that you've been focused on for basically your whole career is business resiliency and making sure that there isn't a single point of failure. Can you help explain to our listeners who maybe haven't spent their whole careers focusing on it, why is that so important and why is it so hard in edge computing?

If you think about businesses today are operating 247 around the world. Many of the businesses are global around the world. The ability to continue and the continuous of the business and continue to provide a service is something basic today. When you are go to and want to buy something in Amazon.

com you expect it will be there. If you want to enter to your train, you expect to be able to pass the ticket and go in. And therefore the business resiliency is became something which is in many cases aligned with the availability of the online service. Without having the service there, the digital service available, it make it impossible to continue and provide the business that the customers and of your business are expecting today.

If you are looking on the world, there are in the past we had the resources physical nature, resources like water. Later on we had the electricity which became kind of a critical resource. We cannot live without water, we cannot live without electricity. I think that in the last years, maybe even in the last decades, the Internet became such resource.

Today we cannot live without Internet, especially after the COVID period that just accelerate and maybe completed the recent things which didn't yet pass the revolution of online service. Today everything is via online service. Today if Internet is down and you cannot do anything, you're stuck. Like stuck without the water, like stuck without electricity.

So the Internet must be there. And the funny thing is because we now have all these smart homes and our water purifier is connected to the Internet and our heat is connected to the Internet, you literally won't have those without having connectivity. One thing that I think shocked everyone is how fragile the Internet is. And when Cloudflare went down towards the end of last year and everything from ChatGPT to whole sites were down, I think it sort of woke people up to how fragile everything is.

So if it's such a big risk to have a single point of failure, why do customers stick to just one cdn? I think it's a fantastic question. And finally the Internet here is not started and developed, not since yesterday, it's here for years. And the customers always appreciated the multi edge or multi CDN approach.

It was here for I think more than 10 years around. But there was a huge challenge to go and adopt multi edge strategy or multi CDN strategy was a huge challenge. It required significant engineering efforts to work with multiple different edge providers in parallel. That these edge providers are significantly different one from another.

So the basics are identical. But when you are using more and more edge capabilities and today most of the customers using more and more edge capabilities, it's become more and more complicated. And therefore giant companies like services like Amazon.com even if they have their own CDN, they are doing multi CDN.

They cannot rely on single physical network. Same thing with TikTok, with PayPal, Walmart and other services for these kind of organizations. These giants, they are building entire engineering organizations to work in such architecture. But it's not affordable for majority of large and medium sized enterprises.

It will cause to significant expenses to cause to defocus of the team. And this is the reason why till today the adoption of multi edge went pretty well in the video streaming world where it was easier to adopt it and it was much more complicated for media publishers, for e commerce and other verticals and IO river make it possible and affordable for everyone. With IO river you can adopt a multi edge strategy but in a click, in a few minutes you will have it and you can go to sleep well and not think about your next Cloudflare outage.

That's great. And having heard from some of the customers, it is so easy to adopt. And that's part of the things they love is everyone expects it to take months and months to set up and be this terrible process. And it's simple.

Click right. True. We actually, you know, during the 3 hours Cloudflare outage, we onboarded customers, we succeeded to save customers. During these three hours, they reached out us, we onboarded them and brought them live.

After one hour, they saved two hours of outage, which was amazing for them till today. They are very, very thankful to I.O. river for helping them to, you know, to reduce the implication of these outages, because these outages caused billions dollars of damage to the industries.

And we're happy that we could save at least some of them from being impactful like that. I'm sure there's many enterprises that just heard that, that are wishing they knew about you in that moment because it was a painful one for a lot of people. We built our river to help with that. Absolutely.

And I think that brings me to my next question, which is it's one thing to build a product, and you and Mickey have done an incredible job with your thought leadership, building a great product. You've also built a great business with a company and people and customers and all that. So as you think about building your team, what's been the hardest part and what's some surprises for you? So, first of all, I think that when Mickey and myself started the journey, we made a decision that we want to build a premium company.

In order to build a premium company, the first thing is to build a tier A team. And when you are building tier A team, you don't compromise. So we refuse to compromise on anything. So this is the first thing, the second thing.

We are in this industry for 25 years, we worked with so many good people and we had the luck to bring to the team the best people that we worked with over the time. Personally, it's the first time that I'm in the field side, that I'm in the sell side, the first time that I'm helping and trying to sell a product. And most of the time I build the products and was on the engineering side. And when we started IO river, one of the things that we did is we brought a sales leader, Amos Ben Yakov, to the team.

And the reason why we did it is because I didn't want to pay the learning curve of me to Learning how to become the right seller or how to sell things in my startup, in my baby. So we brought him in practically the beginning. I learned from him a lot of how to become a better seller or a more matured sale guy. And together we started to build a business.

So at least from my perspective is, you know, when you build a company you want to build probably around the people that the best people that you can bring in, the best people that you probably worked during your years in the industry, the best people that working together as a team. And you also want to complete and bring even better people to the places that you have a gaps there. Finally you as a founder, you can't have skills everywhere, you cannot have experience everywhere.

And you must have great people around you, you must have the best team around you, you must have the best investors around you, the best advisors around you. And by having that, I think that the chances for the startup journey to finish where it should be become much higher. That's great. And I will say having met some of the actually most of the team, it's amazing how what a strong culture you've built where everyone feels like they own part of it and they care so much and they're really bought in.

I mean it feels like not a team of two co found everyone else, but really a whole team of co founders who's bought into the mission together. Which I think speaks very highly to both your ability to hire well but also empower those people to play to their strengths and be able to help augment everyone. Yeah, I agree. I think the thing is the team building and again it's starting from the team, from the employees, but it's go to the customers Today, you know, customers is a huge channel for referral for us.

Again they are part of IO river, investors are part of the family, advisors are part of the family and we just grow the family, we just make the family larger and larger and it's our mission again, it's our world. We want to make the world more resilient. We want to make our day by day life something which rely on Internet better. And we are here for that.

One thing that was really impressive when we first met you guys was how fast your deal cycles are. And it really seems like for a company that's as early as you do the customer's ability to meet you try the solution and then want to start paying for it right away was much faster than we expected. Were there any decisions that you made or areas that you focused on that helped with that? So I Can tell you that our board, especially Ronnie, is a Javi that was part of the board from day one.

We always manage the conversations regarding whether what we are building is nice to have for companies or must to have of the companies. And Mickey and myself together with the team, we try to push ourselves to ensure that what we are building is a must have for customers and not nice to have. Because on every board meeting this is the first question that I was asked whether we are sure that we are building a must have thing for our customers. So we invest a lot of thought in how we are building the product which will be the must have for the companies, how we are building the story which will be a must have for the companies.

And finally this is what we succeeded to do. This is the point that we reached. And now when we have something which is must like I had now, you know, in the last 30 minutes, the customer comes and listen, yes, I want to solve it, I won't have it. And the urgency is there.

So we have a meeting two days from now to go forward. So you can achieve it only when you have something which is urgent and urgency coming with a must have solution. And I thanks to the board and to Ronnie that pushed us constantly to ensure that we are doing a must have thing and not a nice have. Oh, fantastic.

And I do think you and Mickey, your vision, your thought leadership, everything, it's been really amazing to watch and honor to be a part of and be able to learn from. Okay, we have a couple of rapid fire questions that we hear a lot from our listeners and so we're going to go through three and I'd love your quick perspective on them. The first one is coming back to the team. How do you build a high accountability team without micromanaging?

I hire the best people. Very simple, very simple. Fantastic. And when you're thinking about Pipeline, how engaged are you in the deals and how do you stay engaged while also making sure that it's your salesperson that's leading it and driving it and empowered.

Honestly, till today I am the se, I'm joined to and Nikki as well joined to significant amount of the sales meetings. So yes, we have amazing sales leadership that's leading this meeting and managing them right. But I'm there to help them and support them for their success. So by having there and there is no replacement for to hear the customer and see the customer and therefore I'm investing as much as I can to be in the customer meetings no matter when, no matter which day, what time, I will be there to listen to customers and talk about a great way to build up the confidence of your team as well to say, you know, you're driving it, you're the sales leader, I'm going to be your se.

I'm all the support for you. Right. That's so great. Yeah.

I think this is the success of the sales leadership, is the success of the company and it's the success. It's also my personal successes. That's awesome. Okay, last question is what do you look for in investors as you are continuing to build your business?

So first of all it's definitely the backup but even more important that we all like to celebrate successes. It's huge fun. But the way is a tough way and it's important for me to have the investors and they're on the tough days, on the days that the things are not going well and I'm lucky to have Venture guides and S Capital and the new era supporting us and I saw how they helped us even when the days were a little bit more complicated for us and brought us to also to celebrations.

So it's important to have a backup from the investors from my perspective and be with us also when the things are a little bit more complicated. It's been a complicated year but your guys leadership has been remarkable through all of it. Really, really impressive. I keep saying that, but it's so true.

If I can ask you some question, you know, in the last year you decided, you and venture guys decided to go in and join and join to IO river, what was the reason for this decision? I love this question. It was an obvious decision and there's a million reasons, but two main ones. The first one is like you, we believe strongly that the application is the business today and everything transacts online over communications, over the network, all of that.

And it's not healthy for businesses to have a single point of failure. But the challenges of CDNs and configuration and security and all that means that for most businesses, ones that can't run their own CDN or pay for multiple, it is a single point of failure. And that was part of what was so painful about Cloudflare. And also by the way, AWS had an outage, Azure had an outage, even Akamai had some moments of outage as well.

So the fact that there was a platform that was so critical to everybody that was so far behind and such a high risk in terms of business resilience, it was a no brainer to invest in the future. The second piece is kind of the fun piece which is because the platform had been so critical, there wasn't a lot of innovation. You experienced us firsthand, you and Mickey both. And I actually think, while it might take some time to realize it, you're helping all of the edge vendors, by the way, and also future startups who want to be edge vendors.

Because when you can separate out the two pieces of the innovation and the platform with also the getting content to the customers and you can create this virtual layer, the edge vendors can innovate more. And by the way, they can innovate more without taking half the Internet down when something doesn't work. So I just think the opportunity for IO river with enterprises directly is massive and critical. I can't think of a single business that doesn't need to operate IO river unless you're like farming or something.

But even then everything is hooked up to the Internet and communication patterns. So everything needs I.O. river.

But more importantly, the opportunity that I.O. river creates for the market and for innovation is remarkable. And when we have AI coming and we're going to have, I had a customer tell me the other day, we're going to need to completely rearchitect and rethink how we think about the Internet.

You can't do that if you're so critical that you can't innovate. Right? So every company changes the world. But one thing I say with absolute confidence is we don't even know how different the world is going to look because of IO river.

The impact you will have is so much bigger than I think any of us can imagine right now. And so that's why long answer, but that's why. So thanks for that and I agree with you. We are disrupting the edge.

We are doing two main things. One is democratizing the edge and allow not only Akamai and not only AWS networks to become part of the global Internet delivery and become part of the global infrastructure. And from other side, we decoupling the bundle which created on the edge between the application services and the infrastructure. One of the last cloudflare outages caused because of changing the application level.

It cannot take the Internet down, shouldn't take the Internet down. And therefore the decoupling of these two layers are so critical and will also allow and allows today with IO river to enter to other companies, which security companies, application companies, to take a larger presence on the edge. And I think the Internet world looks different with IO river compared to what it was before that. And it's amazing journey.

We'll see how it will go and what an awesome responsibility and power to drive to be the company that ends up creating all this new opportunity for future startups and for future innovation and for current companies to get to the edge and all that. I mean, it's really what you and Mickey thought about and have built and are maniacally focused on and your focus on serving customers and all that, it's so important, impressive. And your mark on the world and on the future of innovation and all of that will be amazing.

Thank you. There's a couple questions I have for you before we wrap. If you could start your journey with IO river all over again, knowing what you know today, what would you do differently? A lot.

A lot of things. But honestly, one of the investors sometimes told me that you are first timer only once. Next time I will not be first timer and I will leverage all the learnings from this amazing journey and do things better. I think that in any aspect it's possible to do to do things better.

And when you have experience and better understanding, I would do things more accurate in the right timing, with less pressure, with better understanding of the reality and of the interactions and of the expectations. So next time will be exciting as well. But the journey with iorevers is amazing. I think we achieved till today, we reached amazing milestones, but I believe that the future of IO river is all ahead of us.

We have a lot of things that we should do. We have the right team, we have the right investors behind us, we have the right momentum and most important, the right need. The customers. The need is there.

We should execute. We should execute as a company and we will do it. And we will make the Internet better, more resilient for all of us. Fantastic.

What's a leadership lesson that you wish more founders understood as they grow their own businesses? So first of all, I think that there are things which are taking a time and sometimes you want that everything will be yesterday, it will not happen yesterday. And sometimes it's important to take the time. It's important to take the time to build it.

Careful to build it right. And this is probably my advice. Just we want to run very fast, do it carefully, do it right. I was speaking with Jack Egan from EMC the other day and he said there's two types of solutions.

There's a long term solution and then there's a band aid. And too often people put band aids on everything because they just want to move fast and keep moving and solve it and move forward. But especially with product and especially with things that are going to be impacting customers. It's really important to be thoughtful and purposeful and build a long term solution as opposed to just a quick fix and move on.

So I think that makes a lot of sense. All right, as we wrap up, is there anything else you'd like to add or share with our listeners? You know we started with the Cloudflare story with the fact that they're experiencing outages and again the Cloudfront, fantastic company, fantastic platform and it happens to all the players around. From our conversations in the last months with customers is that 2025 finished for Internet in a bad way.

No one wants to be in this situation 2026 and I think that now when we are at the beginning of 2026 and the organizations are planning their roadmaps for 2026, I see many organizations putting on their roadmap for 2026 to have a resilient edge solution. And it doesn't mean that they are planning to leave Cloudflare or Akamai or any other vendor. They are fantastic. All of them are fantastic vendors.

But the customer don't want to pay the cost of a mistake that happens and will happen to all of these vendors. They need simply more reliable resilient edge solution. And I engage all the customers, all the organizations that felt the impact of cloudflare outage and understand the criticality of their online service to put on the roadmap of 2026 to build more resilient edge solution for their services. I think it's critical for the Internet, it's critical for us as a human and we'll be glad to help with that in a fun way.

When we were at Turbo we used to talk about five nines in the cloud. Your point is? It's not just in the cloud, it's five nines everywhere. And the edge is a key component of that.

Exactly. Today it's impossible to achieve with single vendor to achieve even four nines of availability. I'm not talking about five nines availability everywhere and tomorrow this is the expectation you don't want to stay behind, you want to be there. So I hope and believe and based on what I'm hearing, it will be a significant aspect that will be upgraded in our technological environment during 2026.

Eddie, where can people learn more about you and IO river the most trivial one is www. IowaRiver IO our website. But I'm also on LinkedIn and you can feel free to find me there. Well, thank you so much Eddie.

This has been really great and such a special time for the business giving everything that's happening in the market for us with you coming to Boston. So fantastic news. We're so happy to have you here and honestly for the world because this is the beginning of a new Internet and a new Edge. Thank you very much Edge for having me with you here.

It's a pleasure to be and work together side to side. I'm sure that we are only the beginning of this amazing journey. It's just the beginning. Absolutely.

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