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INTERVIEW 🎙️

Hermann Frank, Co-Founder & CEO at Gigs

Hermann Frank is the Co-Founder and CEO of Gigs, a San Francisco-based company building what it calls the world's largest telecom carrier delivered as software. Before Gigs, Hermann co-founded Hypermesh with Dennis Bauer, a venture the pair treated as a deliberate hunt for the one industry most starved of modern infrastructure. Telecom won. Gigs came out of the 2021 Y Combinator batch and have since raised $97M total, including a $73M Series B in December 2024 led by Ribbit Capital, with backing from Google's Gradient Ventures, among others. The platform now powers mobile connectivity for Revolut, Klarna, Nubank, and a growing list of Fortune 500 enterprise customers.

What makes Gigs unusual is the scale of the problem and the company Hermann keeps while building it. His cap table includes Dara Khosrowshahi, Tony Xu, and Fidji Simo, public-company CEOs who don't typically write angel checks for fun. Gigs has a user base of nearly 950 million people across its platform partners, provisions connectivity to more than 100,000 employees of one of the Magnificent Seven across 40 markets, and didn't hire a single person from telecom until it crossed 130 employees. The thesis: the last industry software hasn't eaten is also the most defensible thing left to build.

What does Gigs do, and why does it matter?

Gigs is building the world's largest telecom carrier, delivered as software. We're the first company to rebuild the entire telecom stack from the ground up—from the radio access—and build it as one end-to-end operating system, so it's programmable, 24/7, global by nature, and composable to technology platforms on the consumer and enterprise side. The reason this needs to exist is that telecom carriers are the last major industry in the world that has not yet been eaten by software. They're still very local. They're usually national entities that have been privatized or partially privatized, dating all the way back to when the railway was built, so you have a lot of legacy, government legacy, the politics, all the slowness of this incumbency. As a result, they haven't been able to modernize over the last 30 years.

The world has moved forward a great deal. It's mostly driven by software now. Enterprises operate on software, consumers operate on software and apps, and telecom has become the largest rent-payer in the internet economy, because they don't have the rails to natively embed and connect themselves. You have this really large, messy industry without a common interface. It's not global, and it incurs insane customer acquisition costs.

AT&T, for example, in one of its recent quarters, paid $900M to acquire 300,000 subscribers. That's $3,000 per subscriber to sell you an unlimited plan. It takes many years to amortize a customer, so there's no more money left. On the other hand, given that they run on a stack of legacy vendors that are mostly outsourced, operational efficiency is not improving. They have to pay a ton of people to do tasks that other industries have automated long ago.

These are the two problems we're tackling. First, we're eliminating the customer acquisition cost by embedding telecom carriers directly into the world's largest consumer and enterprise apps. Second, we're automating the entire telco operation by making everything programmable and agentic—customer support, back office, and so on. The result is a 75% lower cost base for operating a carrier, because that's how much carriers are currently spending on customer acquisition, operations, customer support, and back-office. Only 25 to 30% in some periods goes to actually building and maintaining the network. That's someone who has to climb poles to install, maintain, and operate the antenna. The rest is just inefficiency at this point, and that's what we're solving from the ground up.

Who is your ideal customer, and why are they building on top of Gigs?

Our ICP is tech in a broader sense. These are the largest consumer and enterprise platforms. Revolut, Klarna, and Nubank are just some of our consumer customers, but we also power enterprise connectivity for global companies. For example, we're provisioning connectivity to over 100,000 of the Mag 7 employees through Gigs, and we are abstracting carrier relationships and operations in over 40 markets to make this happen. Now you have one API call that can provision a phone plan for an employee instantaneously and deliver it to their email, Slack, or directly to their device. While previously this was a process of two-plus weeks, over 40 steps, most of them requiring humans, now it's a real-time service that you can call and provision globally.

Currently, we have aggregated a total addressable user base of about 950M people across platforms. It doesn't mean we have 950M lines or that we're visible to that many people, but we are embedded in platforms with this user base, and we're progressing well in selling the service and making mobile a true product. This is the largest distribution surface that anyone in the world has ever built for telecom.

How did you come up with the idea for Gigs?

We built a product that worked really well, and by the end we needed a service that would let us programmatically access an LTE network. It was kind of a product expansion we were experimenting with. Basically, we wanted to buy an eSIM through an API. For us, it was the most obvious thing that this would exist, because you have Stripe, AWS, you can get hosting, you can get payments in an instant, and we found that it doesn't exist. You cannot just programmatically provision yourself onto a network. That was mind-blowing to us, especially in the age of eSIM.

We looked into the industry, tried to understand why, and broke it down to ‘what if we can solve this, and you can just provision yourself or your devices onto a network, not just for IoT but for the actual real phone plan’. Then, basically, what would come next is what follows in any other comparable industry: you create a completely new interface for it. We had the pain. It was mind-boggling to us that it didn't exist. We understood why, and then we just set out to create the tool we hoped would exist.

What was the hardest part of going from zero to one?

When we started talking to people about what we wanted to do, people were really hesitant, believing that no carrier in the world would let you do this. So we needed to find a way to actually integrate ourselves into a carrier, and no carrier would talk to us initially, unsurprisingly.

This party was an aggregator that had been relatively unsuccessful on its own, so when the network started to see where this growth was coming from (those guys haven't grown in a long time), it kind of piqued their interest. We also got the right people on board to advise us on how to interact with that carrier, and that had pull in there. By proving our point, building a product through the back door, and securing the right internal allies, we secured our first carrier deal. That made it easier to get other deals. The other thing is, no one has created a consistent API for telecom that you can use across multiple countries. That was the next thing that people said was impossible. Some people in the competitive field are still running around saying it doesn't work, but obviously, there's more than enough proof now. So the other hard lift up front was abstracting differently regulated, functioning carriers into a single cohesive layer, then repeating that over and over and over again.

Then we started with smartwatches because we felt they were relatively forgiving. If you're down on your iPhone for even a second, you're going to hate us, but these smartwatches were not like an Apple Watch. They were like kids' smartwatches, elderly smartwatches. Basically, it's there so someone can open an app and see where the person is. It was an amazing niche that we stumbled upon through one of our advisors. That allowed us to build the initial platform on which we could raise our seed and Series A. Then it was another two years of buildout after that, so it was a total of over three years until we could serve actual smartphone use cases, and people would not shut us down for that.

How did Y Combinator shape your early thinking and go-to-market?

YC is these great rails: they put you on rails, make you fast, help you develop a cadence as a company, and make you hard on yourself and iterate. They also take away a lot of anxieties that founders walk around with, like, you know, ‘it's fine to pivot’. Luckily, we didn't need to pivot during YC, but they bring in the most successful YC founders over the past decade and a half to talk about what they're best at. So you have the Stripe founders telling you how to build a hard company and scale it, and a lot of cultural stuff. You have the Brex founders who came in and talked about pivoting mid-batch, because they pivoted from VR to fintech. You have Airbnb founders who tell you that you need to push through hard times more than you think is reasonable.

You get this intimate view into how some of the best companies in the world are built, while being on this fast-paced curriculum and having access to what is probably the largest brain trust on building companies. If you look at the role of an investor, if they're really helpful, they've seen hundreds or, ideally, in the case of YC, thousands of businesses being built. They don't know how to build your product, and that's why they invest in you, because you have this unique insight about your particular thing. But they are the largest machine on earth when it comes to building an actual business, making decisions as a founder as the company grows. You have the people who have seen the most of it in the world.

Then you end up being one of the best-performing YC companies. You used to have YC Growth, which was basically a graduate school of YC. For us, that was also immensely helpful, because for three consecutive years, we had a YC program tailored to the stage we were in.

What does your day-to-day look like as CEO?

I spend a lot of time on hiring. Dennis and I still interview every candidate who joins Gigs. We used to be first, now we go last, because otherwise it would not be manageable. That occupies quite a lot of time. Then I work on more strategic topics. I'm heavily involved if we do a first-of-its-kind deal, like the first very large fintech or the first enterprise deal for enterprise connectivity. I work with the team on these types of structures so that they can be repeatable afterward. Usually, I disengage after that, but I'm still partially with the team on very important deals, even though they are of a similar nature.

I'm still quite heavily involved in the connectivity org, because we have the supply side—dealing with carriers, pitching them, selling them on the vision. While there's a growing number of carriers that love us now, there is still a lot of skepticism or even anxiety about what we do. It's an ever-evolving theme of how to address that. How to say “hey, we're actually here to help” because we're truly building this company to make carriers more efficient at the end of the day as well. The TAM for us is not just launching the services we launch right now. It's then deploying this operating system that we build into the carriers themselves. So I spend a lot of time there.

Then, the strategic product roadmap is used whenever we decide to build a product. Because it's such a complex business, I also spend a lot of time trying to see around the corner, what potential pitfalls we might be running into. And finally, fundraising whenever the time is right.

What do you think about hiring in deep tech?

I'm a massive believer in lateral innovation. It's a concept that's been popularized by Nintendo. The Game Boy was a prime example of that. If you look at the Game Boy, none of the technology in it was new. They didn't engineer something from the ground up. The displays were there, the computation was there. What they did was put the pieces together in a new format. That's, in short, lateral innovation.

One thing we've been driving at Gigs since day one is ‘we are building something that others have built in another industry before’. Stripe is, of course, the closest example. So we hire a lot of people from companies that have built these infrastructure companies in other industries. That works tremendously well, especially if you hire from Stripe or Adyen. The people who were there early, they come in, they know intuitively what to do, even though they have zero knowledge about telecom. Until we were about 130 people, we hadn't had a single person from telecom at Gigs. Very purposefully. So that, I would say,’s probably our number one go-to: just hire people who have done this before in a different industry, because they can lay out the map in front of them and then fill it with the telecom roadmap.

We hire heavily for stage fit. One of the biggest predictors we've seen of people not succeeding is that you hire someone from a really cool company that we love to have, but they were late. They were employee number 5,000 or 10,000, and they just sometimes don't know how to operate in an environment with this much ambiguity this early. Or what you get is that they were there when everything was already magical. All the problems had been solved; there was a rocket ship, and they lived through this fever dream of building it, but they don't appreciate how hard it was for the first 150 people to get there. How much of a shit show some of these companies were at these early stages. They only got the good part, so stage fit is a top priority.

Then we look for self-guided people. My go-to is, ‘You're the expert. I'm hiring you to be the expert in your field. I most likely don't know as much as you do and don't have as good an intuition for what to do.

How are you using AI operationally at Gigs today, and how are you thinking about it?

We're currently building what I think many companies are building. This kind of ‘company brain’ where we record almost everything we do in meetings and funnel it into one central plane to eliminate information entropy and asynchronicity, and create one promptable source of truth about everything that's going on in the company.

I've started creating an operating system for myself, too. It started very simply, ‘I run a 150-person company, and I'm struggling with this particularly difficult stage for companies—because at 150, things start to break.’ So I need to upgrade the company's operating system. I need to get better at this, and we need to get better at this as a company. I'm a bottleneck for people because, yes, on some subject matters, I need to review and approve. Now I have an operating system that makes it easier for me to run things and create a cadence and a communication system. We're also trying to implement some of the things many companies go through on their journey as AI companies, which we found resonated strongly with what we've been trying to achieve and the problems we're seeing, so we'll see where that goes.

Cash App unveiled mobile powered by Gigs. What does this represent for the industry?

Cash App is the largest personal finance app in the U.S., and now it's enabling millions of modern earners to have a mobile native product inside their banking app. Distribution of telecom and customer relationships are migrating into the apps people use and love. Cash App Mobile runs on AT&T's network, through Gigs—a trusted carrier, a software operating system that makes it embeddable and operates the subscriber base, and a fintech with tens of millions of users. There’s a population-scale migration to redefine what connectivity is and how it's embedded into the apps people already rely on.

We've already seen this play out globally. Revolut, Klarna, and Nubank all launched mobile offerings, and none of them treated connectivity as an experiment. Once they owned the primary customer relationship, adding mobile was a natural extension of what they already provided. Every major consumer platform will eventually offer connectivity because the economics make sense. If an app already manages your direct deposit, debit card, savings, and daily spending, it's a more natural place to manage a phone plan than a carrier store.

How do you get the best out of yourself?

When I'm in San Francisco, I try to go for extended hikes every weekend. That takes me out. The only downside is that I don't do it enough. I should be exercising way more, and I'm trying to get into these routines more, but I'm never anywhere more than three weeks. You build a habit, and now you're switching continents, the habit breaks again, and then you need to start over. So I'm getting better at this slowly. I have an exercise routine. You wouldn't believe how much even 30 minutes of light-to-moderate exercise a few times a week can change your energy, mood, inflammation, and all of that. That's been helpful. The good thing is, every time I actually do it, I really, really feel differently. I feel much, much better.

I love cooking. That's something I picked up during college and then tried to drive to the highest level that I could for myself. It's relaxing for me because we're building these virtual things, and that allows me to be creative in the real world with real ingredients and stuff. That's something I enjoy doing. I read a lot too. I think you just need to. In a world that just bombards you with all kinds of bullshit, books and history are great guides to how things work.

Extra reading

• Embedded connectivity: A better economic model for phone retailers - January, 2026

• Gigs & Google Cloud: Inside the Reinvention of Telecom - December, 2025

• Mobile: A new frontier for B2B fintech - August, 2025

• Mobile services are unleashing new banking frontiers with Gigs - July, 2024

And that’s it! You can follow Hermann on LinkedIn or check out Gigs on their website to keep up with what they’re building!

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