Chris Chuang Built a Button. His Customers Changed the Plan.

Chris Chuang wanted a way for children to call home. The device his team built had a speaker, a large button, and no screen. It could travel in a pocket without bringing the rest of the internet along. Then the orders began arriving from people with rather different responsibilities: businesses wanted to equip their workers. The parents had company.

That unexpected audience gave Chuang a decision to make. He had helped create a product around a problem in his own household. Now other people were showing him where it might belong. Relay’s subsequent life in hotels and factories grew out of paying attention to those buyers, a useful reminder that a customer can be both a source of revenue and an editor of the original plan.

A household problem, with a very large button

When Relay launched in May 2018, Chuang was leading Republic Wireless and raising four children. The intended users were six to eleven years old. Their parents wanted a practical way to reach them before giving them smartphones. A child could press to talk; a parent could respond through a companion app. Cellular and Wi-Fi connections supplied the distance that an ordinary toy walkie-talkie could not.

“The mission of Relay is deeply personal for our team,” Chuang said at the launch. He and his colleagues were designing something they wanted for their own families. That is a more concrete starting point than a forecast about a market: someone needs to get a message to a child, and the available products ask the family to accept much more technology than the task requires.

The missing screen was part of the answer. A familiar consumer-electronics instinct is to make a device capable of more things. Relay gave its first users fewer things to negotiate. There was no elaborate interface to admire. You pressed the button and spoke. For a company whose founders understood networks, putting so little on the surface was a deliberate choice.

The long route to a simple device

Chuang’s route to that button passed through economics, consulting, investing, and years of operating telecom businesses. He earned a B.A. in Economics at Stanford, then joined McKinsey. His career took him to Technology Crossover Ventures and to Motricity, where he worked in strategic development. In 2008, he joined Bandwidth, eventually serving as chief operating officer.

Those roles put him on several sides of the table: advising businesses, evaluating investments, and taking responsibility for products and operations. The chronology is less tidy than the familiar founder story in which a single revelation explains everything. He had accumulated experience in the infrastructure that lets a conversation arrive at its destination. Relay would need that experience even when its users never thought about it.

At Republic Wireless, the proposition was to use Wi-Fi for calls when possible and cellular networks when needed. That approach aimed to lower the cost of mobile service. Chuang became CEO after Republic separated from Bandwidth in 2016. The eventual Relay product drew on the same ability to make different networks cooperate behind an uncomplicated experience.

In 2021, DISH acquired Republic’s consumer wireless business. Relay continued separately, with Chuang as co-founder and CEO. The separation gave the enterprise product its own company and management focus. By then, the question of who would use the little communicator had changed substantially.

The orders that rewrote the brief

“Demand sort of showed up at our doorstep,” Chuang said in 2019. Businesses had started buying Relay, attracted by qualities that had also suited children: a small device, straightforward controls, and durability. An enterprise version followed. A product introduced for families was finding a working day of its own.

“Demand sort of showed up at our doorstep.”

Chris Chuang, 2019

Consider the practical appeal. For a worker moving around a property, communication is one task among several. Looking down, finding an app, and navigating a touchscreen takes attention away from the job. A physical button offers a familiar action. The employer, meanwhile, needs a way to reach a team whose members are scattered across rooms, floors, or buildings.

Chuang had not invented the habit of pressing to talk. His opportunity was to keep that habit while changing what supported it. Relay connected the device to software, giving managers tools that a conventional radio conversation alone could not provide. The enterprise direction expanded to location capabilities, urgent alerts, and coordination through a web dashboard.

The change of audience also altered the standard of usefulness. A family product must fit into family life. Equipment carried through a shift must fit into the routines of people who have work waiting. The device has to earn its place alongside everything else they carry. A compelling demonstration offers a beginning; repeated use supplies the more demanding verdict.

A coach who keeps taking the calls

Chuang’s introductions often begin at home. In a June 2024 interview, he placed being a father and husband ahead of his executive responsibilities. By that point, he and his wife had been married for twenty years. His account of the original Relay problem makes that ordering relevant: family life helped determine which communication problem he noticed first.

There is another team in his life, too. He has coached youth basketball for more than a decade. During his Bandwidth years, he was documented playing at Carmichael Gym on North Carolina State’s campus. The company even provided transport for its basketball players. There are less sociable ways to spend a lunch break.

His community commitments have a similarly long history. He and his wife, Linda, began attending Hope Community Church in 2006, and he has served as an elder since 2016. They have also led small groups. These are sustained relationships in the same region where he has spent much of his operating career, beyond the succession of company names on his résumé.

At Relay, he describes relationships as part of the job. In December 2025, he said he still interviewed every candidate joining the team and enjoyed speaking directly with customers. That is a specific practice behind a common management claim. He was putting his own time into meeting the people who would build the product and the people expected to use it.

His description of company culture includes an acronym, BWIML, for “Best Work In My Life,” pronounced “bee-wimmel.” It is an unusually pronounceable piece of corporate shorthand. He connects it to the conditions employees need to do good work, and says leaders have to demonstrate the values they ask others to follow. The language is aspirational; the personal interviews are something more observable.

When the customer buys a stake

In June 2024, Relay announced a $35 million Series B led by G2 Venture Partners. Chuang’s letter to customers linked the funding to requests and feedback from existing users. Features including TeamTranslate and Rounds had emerged from those conversations. Translation addressed colleagues working in different languages; Rounds addressed the routine of tracking patrols and scheduled checks.

These are specific, everyday problems. They help explain why Chuang’s account of the company keeps circling back to customers. A useful request can arrive in the language of an ordinary shift, long before it has a product name. The CEO’s task includes recognising which of those requests can become a tool worth building for many teams.

Two years later, an existing customer took a different role. International Paper led Relay’s September 2026 funding round, joined by new and returning investors. Chuang emphasised the sequence: the industrial company had used the system before investing. Thayer Investment Partners brought connections to hotel businesses already familiar with Relay, too.

That arrangement suited his stated preference for demonstrating value in actual operations. The backers had a view of what happened after a purchase. For a former venture investor now running the company, the relationship had come around from another direction: an organisation familiar with the product was helping finance its future.

Recognition had arrived along the way. Chuang won an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year Southeast award in 2025. Relay appeared on the Inc. 5000 for three consecutive years, reaching No. 830 in 2026. In October, the company described plans to hire as many as 100 workers and expand globally. Growth was creating another set of operating responsibilities.

The next thing he wants the radio to hear

Chuang’s current ambition extends beyond getting a voice across a building. He wants the knowledge inside spoken work to become useful to the organisation. People on a shift notice recurring problems, explain interruptions, and pass along context. Much of that information can disappear once the conversation ends. The radio is already near the person who knows what happened.

In February 2026, he discussed turning voice communication into data that could help factory teams. The ambition gives the physical device a second responsibility. It carries the immediate message while providing a route for information into digital systems. Translation can help colleagues understand one another now; a searchable record can help someone understand the shift later.

There is a practical tension in that expansion. Every additional capability asks more of the technology behind a simple interaction. Chuang’s earlier businesses supplied experience in voice and wireless connectivity. Relay’s next chapter asks him to combine that experience with software that makes the captured information useful. The person pressing the button still has a job to finish.

Back in 2018, a parent wanted to hear from a child. Today, Chuang is working on what an employer might learn by listening to the people doing the work. The setting has changed, and the ambitions have grown. The original design choice remains recognisable: give someone a straightforward way to speak, then take care over what happens on the other side.