One Year Later with CFO & COO Evan Fein

One year ago, Evan Fein joined the TextNow leadership team as Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer. Since his arrival in April 2021, we’ve experienced a lot of milestones: we launched our free wireless service on an upgraded GSM network, we reached $100 million in revenue for the first time, and we grew our team to more than 200 Textnovians! Evan spoke with the TextNow blog team to look back at his first year and tell us what he’s most excited about in year two.

1. Hi Evan! It has been quite a year. What have been some of your favorite things about working at TextNow?

It has been a fantastic year. There were four big reasons I decided to join TextNow, and every aspect has been even better than I could have imagined.

The first is that I love our mission of democratizing reliable phone service, and it’s energizing to help our team achieve that goal. It’s inspiring to wake up every day to help our customers get connected and use our service to communicate with loved ones and plug into the economy.

The second is that I really enjoy working with the leadership team here. Derek has done a great job of bringing everyone together, and we’ve done some amazing work to get every Textnovian rowing in the same direction.

I also love the culture that we’ve built at TextNow. I’ve worked at a lot of employee-friendly companies, but TextNow is the best of the best. We really live the philosophy of putting people first, and it’s very rewarding.

Finally, I’m excited about the tremendous opportunity we have to disrupt the wireless industry. I truly believe that we can be the Uber or Netflix or Spotify of cell phone service, and I think the work we’ve done over the past year has really set us up to achieve hypergrowth in the coming years.

2. What’s been the biggest surprise about TextNow since you started?

I’ve been a CFO for more than 20 years. I’ve taken a company public, and I’ve worked at places that achieved very successful exits. But the financial performance last year at TextNow is the best I’ve ever been a part of and, with the foundation we’ve built over the last year, I think the sky’s the limit for what we can do. ‍

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3. Which accomplishment are you most proud of from your first year?

The organizational clarity that the senior leadership team has created for ourselves and for the rest of the company is impressive. It takes a lot of commitment, risk and hard conversations, but it’s going to pay off as we expand and grow our free wireless business.

It’s not typical for a company of our size to have this focus, but we have a CEO in Derek that’s committed to making sure we’re on a great path and ready to become a major disruptor in the wireless space.

4. What are you most excited about for your second year?

As I said, with the work we’ve done over the past year, we’re ready to be very disruptive in the wireless space. We’re putting the pieces together to offer a meaningful, holistic package to the marketplace that can replace paid wireless service. No one else can do that, we’re the clear leaders in our space, we wouldn’t trade places with anyone, and that is very exciting.

5. What’s your top priority for this year?

My top priority is to help evangelize our mission, our organizational clarity, and get every Textnovian pointed in the same direction to achieve our goals and advance our mission.

We have a lot of interesting and unique things planned, and we’re hiring a ton, so people who want to join this incredible journey should look at the open positions on our careers page.

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