The machine has no patience for your Wi-Fi. A restaurant terminal wants the order. A scooter wants the unlock command. A freight sensor wants to report where it is. None cares that the router is having a difficult afternoon. This gap between the clean promise of connected devices and the untidy reality of keeping them connected has occupied Benjamin Forgan for more than a decade.
Forgan is the co-founder and CEO of Hologram, the Chicago company that sells cellular connectivity and the software to manage it. His useful shorthand is “phone plans for things that aren’t phones.” The phrase makes the business sound almost obvious. The work beneath it is anything but. Networks change across borders, carrier performance varies from one street to the next, hardware can sit untouched for years, and every service visit turns a small failure into an expensive journey.
Hologram tries to compress that disorder into a SIM, a dashboard and an API. A customer can connect a device across multiple carrier networks, watch a fleet from one place and alter connectivity without retrieving the machine. Good infrastructure earns its living quietly. It becomes interesting at the moment it fails, so Forgan has built a company around making that moment less likely and less dramatic.
The order that did not arrive
The idea began far from a telecom boardroom. After graduating from George Washington University in 2009 with a degree in economics and international affairs, Forgan worked at Digital Sandbox, a startup serving the government sector. Then came Groupon, in the breathless period before its public offering. He helped launch Groupon Goods and, by his telling, performed years of learning in a little over twelve months. Responsibility arrived faster than a job description could keep up.
Next came a one-way flight to Singapore. Forgan co-founded and ran Foodpanda’s local operation, part of the food-delivery company that would later be acquired by Delivery Hero. The glamorous version of this story involves international expansion and a new consumer habit. The useful version involves point-of-sale devices in restaurants and connections that could not be trusted. When Wi-Fi went down, ordering systems lost the thread. To make the operation work across markets, the team had to stitch together cellular options that were awkward to obtain and harder to manage.
Forgan noticed that many friends were building apps while the physical devices underneath those apps remained difficult to bring online. Cellular service had been designed around people buying phones, not developers deploying thousands of silent machines. The inconvenience carried the outline of a business: give builders a programmable route to the internet, much as Stripe had given software companies a programmable route to payments.
“Phone plans for things that aren’t phones.”Ben Forgan’s plain-English definition of Hologram
A company assembled by complementary parts
Forgan returned to the United States in 2014 with the problem but not every skill required to solve it. He had taught himself product and web development. Telecom, however, is a thicket of radio standards, carrier relationships, roaming agreements and hardware constraints. At a panel event he met Pat Wilbur, an engineer whose strengths matched the gaps in his own. They shared a view of where connectivity was going and became co-founders.
That meeting matters because it punctures a common founder myth: conviction is not the same as completeness. Forgan could see the product and sell the future. Wilbur could take the technical problem seriously enough to make the future function. Their partnership supplied both halves. Before outside funding, the pair operated leanly, then recruited early engineers who set the company’s technical habits.
The quiet layer - from field signal to useful decision
The company first helped makers get cellular devices online. The scope widened as customers deployed larger fleets. A connection was only the beginning. Operators needed to know which devices were active, what they cost, where performance weakened and how to change a carrier profile without touching hardware in the field. Hologram’s Hyper product brought over-the-air eUICC profile updates. Its later network-fallback products treated an outage as a condition to route around rather than a summons for human intervention.
The delightful uses of boring plumbing
Infrastructure companies rarely get to choose the most memorable expression of their technology. Hologram’s customers have put connections into e-bikes, agricultural sensors, cargo equipment and payment terminals. One conservation project hid cellular trackers inside 3-D printed decoy sea turtle eggs. Placed in nests, the eggs could reveal trafficking routes when thieves carried them away. The same underlying service that lets a scooter unlock could help show where stolen wildlife went.
This is Forgan’s recurring motivation: Hologram provides the plain layer, while customers make the remarkable object. In 2021, he described the company as a humble infrastructure provider with people building cool things on top. The modesty is operationally useful. It keeps product attention on the common failure modes beneath wildly different applications.
A field sensor and a moving vehicle have different jobs, but both need coverage, visibility and a recovery plan. The abstraction works when Hologram can make a fragmented carrier market resemble a coherent product. Customers should not need a miniature telecom department merely because their hardware crosses a national border.
The lesson extends beyond cellular service. Every product team inherits a stack of dependencies that users will never see and will judge without mercy. The clever interface receives the launch-day applause; the recovery system earns loyalty months later. Forgan’s career has followed that stack downward. Groupon taught him the velocity of a consumer platform. Foodpanda exposed the physical terminal at the edge of one. Hologram turned his attention to the network underneath the terminal. Each move brought him closer to the place where a digital promise meets weather, geography and somebody else’s infrastructure. It is a useful way to search for durable company ideas: follow the recurring annoyance until you reach the layer no single customer can sensibly rebuild. Then make that layer legible. Give it controls, records and sensible defaults. The result may lack the theatre of a new gadget, but it can become part of thousands of gadgets whose makers are delighted to forget the problem ever existed.
A decade is a product feature
Forgan has offered one observation that fits both his temperament and his market: people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year and underestimate what they can accomplish in a decade. Cellular infrastructure rewards the longer view. Carrier relationships accumulate. Network behavior produces data. Device fleets expose edge cases that no whiteboard session could invent. Reliability emerges from meeting those cases repeatedly.
Graduates from George Washington University and enters the startup world.
Moves to Singapore to build Foodpanda’s local operation.
Co-founds Hologram with Pat Wilbur in Chicago.
Introduces Hyper for over-the-air cellular profile management.
Pushes fleet orchestration further into APIs and automated recovery.
His advice to founders follows the same logic. Hire for the company’s next stage. Spend more time on product development at the beginning. Expect to require more capital than the optimistic spreadsheet suggests. Research the end user before burning cycles on assumptions. These are not slogans from a founder chasing novelty. They sound like notes from someone who chose a market where shortcuts eventually return as support tickets.
There is also a family phrase behind the persistence. Forgan’s grandfather was an entrepreneur and told him to “keep on punching.” Another favorite was that people want to do business with people. Both maxims suit telecom, a technology business still built through partnerships, trust and long negotiations. They also suit Forgan’s public style, which mixes technical specificity with blunt views about leadership, high standards and direct feedback.
The real product is not the SIM. It is one less emergency waiting inside every deployed machine.
From connection to recovery
Hologram’s recent direction makes the original thesis sharper. Conductor, promoted by the company in 2026, brings fleet-level eSIM orchestration into a central control surface. Profiles can be switched through software, in bulk or by rule. The management experience now emphasizes clearer activation, proactive device alerts, coverage visibility and billing. The product is moving beyond access toward response: what should the fleet do when its preferred network stops behaving?
That shift reflects a mature understanding of connected products. Coverage maps describe possibility. Operations are lived in exceptions. A global fleet needs to react to congestion, local carrier changes and the occasional dead zone without dispatching a technician or convening an emergency chat. Forgan’s aspiration remains broad - connect any device to any network, anywhere - but the practical work is precise. Make failure observable. Give software a second route. Move the intervention from the roadside to an API call.
The child who once had a “BenTech” bar mitzvah eventually found a technical company to own and things to invent. The punchline is charming because the adult business is so unshowy. Hologram does not make the scooter, terminal, tracker or sensor. It works on the small assurance beneath all of them: when the machine has something to say, the message should have somewhere to go.