Michelle Munson Sets Pace On FASP Track

A keen intellect, relentless drive and passion for technology have propelled Michelle Munson from the Kansas heartland to the fast lane of Silicon Valley as co-founder and CEO of Aspera, a maker of high-speed data transfer software widely used by media companies.

With her friend and eventual husband Serban Simu, Munson launched Aspera on a shoestring in 2003 and quickly prospered by recognizing the need for moving fat video files and figuring out how to do it.

The secret sauce was FASP (Fast, Adaptive, Secure Protocol), which overcame the bottlenecks inherent in sending video over traditional Transmission Control Protocol-based file transfer technologies while providing reliability and security.

With FASP, large files could be transferred hundreds of times faster than conventional FTP sessions, and with a guaranteed delivery time regardless of the file size, transport distance or network conditions.

“We had customers and were break-even in our first year,” Munson says. “We made the first version of the software ourselves, and sold what we made. We marketed it to customers right away, and tried to drive their feedback into each generation.”

Aspera now counts 3,200 customers, more than half of which are media companies trying to keep pace with higher-quality video formats like 4K and the explosion in over-the-top streaming video.

“It was an absolute game-changer, in terms of performance, stability, reliability and security,” says tech consultant Ryan Kido about FASP.

Aspera was recognized in 2013 with an Emmy award for Outstanding Achievement in Engineering Development for its FASP core transport technology.

Munson has also received personal plaudits. She was named the 2006 Kansas State University College of Engineering Alumni Fellow — the youngest on record — as well as 2015 IABM Digital Media and Broadcast Woman of the Year.

Her accomplishments will be recognized withTVNewsCheck’s 2016 Women in Technology Leadership Award. A ceremony and reception will take place at 6 p.m. on April 19 in Room N-227 of the Las Vegas Convention Center during the NAB Show. (Also to be honored then is Jennifer Leung, director of product for the National Football League, chosen as TVNewsCheck’s 2016 Technology Woman to Watch. If you’re interested in attending the ceremony, email Samantha Cerminaro.)

Munson, 43, grew up on a cattle and wheat farm in Junction City, Kan., where the emphasis was on books, not beef. Her mother is a retired college professor, and everyone in her family had gone to college. There was also an affinity for technology, with her parents owning a family computer (a Corona) in the 1980s.

“Education was a big deal,” she says.

Munson threw herself into her studies and was entering statewide math competitions by third grade. Her parents also encouraged her and her brother to pursue extracurricular activities. Munson participated in a local 4-H leadership program from age 7 through her graduation from high school, learning about everything from livestock to fashion to computing.

As she got older, Munson took college-level summer courses in creative writing and computers and studied marine biology at Duke University through a special program for young scholars. She also participated in ballet and modern dance and competed as a long-distance runner in both cross-country and track; she remains a committed exerciser.

“Our parents’ approach was to encourage things that would have a long-term impact on our lives,” she says.

As an exceptional high-school student, Munson had a number of options for college across the U.S., including MIT, but decided to stay close to home.

Besides being “the premier university in my home state,” Kansas State University had two big things going for it. One was a four-year, full-ride scholarship. The other was that Munson had been taking classes on a part-time basis at KSU for two years before she graduated from high school and loved her professors.

“I was saving lots of money, and it was my choice,” Munson says. “It was something I never regretted, but nevertheless, it made for a very different kind of life. What you tend to see at a state school is a willingness to pursue outside opportunities…. There are some exceptional state schools, and I don’t think my story is that unusual.”

Munson spent five years at KSU, where she was a Goldwater Scholar and pursued a double major in physics and electrical engineering through an honors program that offered interdisciplinary courses and emphasized independent study. She did four internships including stints at Sematech, Sandia National Labs, the Office of Technology Assessment in Washington and the Washington Internship for Students of Engineering.

During her senior year, Munson also started an ISP to serve rural customers in Kansas, back when America Online was the only option. Though she earned a prestigious Fulbright Scholarship to pursue graduate study abroad in 1996, she took a year off before going to Cambridge University in England in order to run the ISP business. It had about 800 subscribers when she sold it upon returning to the U.S.

While the big impetus to go to Cambridge was the chance to study abroad, the most important aspect of Munson’s time at Cambridge was a switch to studying computer science.

“That was very intentional, as the internet was just getting started then,” she says.

After earning her master’s in 1998, Munson returned to the United States to work at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., in the systems area.

“They let me choose what I wanted to work on, which is the reason I took the job,” she says. “It was such a great experience; I had never been in an environment where there were so many innovation projects going at one point. That was the bridge to the application network and system space, and I ended up getting recruited into a startup really quickly.”

The first startup, Fast Forward Networks, was founded by a professor out of Berkeley and focused on application-level networking, “creating solutions at the application layer, generally in software, to distribute and aggregate content over the internet.”

Munson made a “lot of introductions” at Fast Forward (acquired by Inktomi) and after a year went on to another startup in the same space, Digital Fountain. There, she worked with Simu and got to spend time meeting with customers and learning about their problems.

Unfortunately, Digital Fountain had exhausted much of its initial capital, and Munson was one of many engineers laid off in late 2002. She was 27.

“Those experiences hardened both of us, Serban and me,” says Munson. “We learned that there’s technology and innovation, and then there’s how to bring it to market.”

Munson says she and Simu wanted to work for themselves, but weren’t comfortable with the existing models for start-ups, which involved raising money from venture capitalists. Munson got $20,000 in initial funding from her parents, and launched Aspera in 2003 out of her garage.

The company’s purpose was to find a solution to the problem of reliably moving large files across wide area networks.

FASP was that solution.

A key to it was eliminating TCP’s flow rate control mechanism, in which every data packet sent requires an acknowledgement that it was received; otherwise, the sending rate is dramatically reduced.

While TCP’s flow-rate controller was intended to ensure reliability, in real-world use across networks with high latency or packet loss it would often make efficient transfer of large files almost impossible.

By comparison, FASP doesn’t tie throughput to network latency or packet loss. Put simply, FASP initially assumes that all packets have been received and resends only packets that are confirmed to have been dropped.

This approach allows it to send files at the maximum available network speed with the only limit being the disk throughput of the computers on each end. FASP uses an adaptive transmission-rate-control algorithm to fully utilize available network bandwidth and balance FASP file transfers against standard TCP traffic like web and email, and also encrypts the files for security.

The first two customers were a government contractor in intelligence work and a Hollywood studio, Warner Bros.

Despite the early success, Aspera ran lean, employing fewer than 10 people for its first two-and-a-half years. It didn’t have its first professional sales person until 2006, and didn’t reach 50 staffers until it was five years old. The company exhibited at its first NAB Show in 2004, and Munson says that working with studios and broadcast networks was “fantastic” for a startup.

“They are very open-minded, and they will embrace and try technology,” she says. “They are open to making an improvement to the train while you are still driving the train. It was fuel for our company, and it was very incremental.”

A big driver for Aspera’s business in recent years has been the increased prevalence of cloud services, where media is stored on remote servers and is broadly accessible through the internet. Fast data transport is essential to cloud services, and Aspera eventually attracted the interest of IBM, which pursued Aspera for more than two years before acquiring it in early 2014.

Aspera is now a subsidiary within IBM’s B2B arm, where it continues to serve its existing customers while helping IBM tap new opportunities in cloud services and big data.

Munson and Simu were in no hurry to sell Aspera and didn’t need to do so financially. But the growth potential of combining with a much larger entity that had its own cloud platform and that could bring Aspera into new markets was enticing.

“Looking back over the past two years, those two things have come true,” says Munson. “We’ve benefited from their global sales channel, and we’ve been able to run our software on their cloud offerings, offering cloud transfer and storage.”

Kido says that despite Aspera’s success, Munson is still the “same tireless person” today as when the company was only four people.

“She’s still very much into the details, what the future is looking like for key customers,” he says. “And she has the technical chops to listen and understand where customers are headed.”

As Aspera evolved, so did the relationship between Munson and Simu, 45, who is Aspera’s VP of engineering.

They married in 2009 and have a five-year-old son, making a home in Berkeley close to Aspera’s Emeryville headquarters. That they have managed to juggle family life with running a still-growing company is unusual in Silicon Valley, much less the broadcast space, Munson acknowledges.

She says that sometimes the mixing of their personal and professional lives can be awkward, but overall, it works.

“We’re complementary to each other, but the way we approach problems is very different,” Munson says. “Serban is the best engineer I’ve ever met in the world, and I have some unusual skills. The other thing that drives us, is that our interest is very specific, and we’ve worked on these problems together.”

Munson expects to see more female leaders in the technology space soon. From a practical point of view, she says the timing for women is “exceptionally good.”

“The more sentimental, intrinsic advice is to have courage,” she says. “Because the fact is that there are no boundaries or limits if you pursue what you are interested in, your passion.”

Learn about TVNewsCheck‘s 2016 Technology Woman to Watch, the NFL’s Jennifer Leung, here.

Read all of TVNewsCheck‘s NAB 2016 news here.