Ian
Small

The Operator Who Shows Up After the Idea

In June 2025, Ian Small walked into Blues - an IoT connectivity company building hardware modules that slip into products and beam data via cellular, Wi-Fi, LoRa, or satellite - as its new CEO. He replaced founder Ray Ozzie, who built the company from scratch and handed off the helm at exactly the moment Blues needed to scale past prototype. Small had been introduced to Ozzie by one of Blues' investors years earlier, so the handshake was a slow courtship rather than a cold interview. By the time he signed, he already knew the company's DNA.

Blues makes the Notecard - a postage-stamp-sized system-on-module that gives any hardware project a path to the cloud without a telecom contract, an antenna specialist, or a carrier negotiation. The pitch is brutally simple: hardware is hard enough; connectivity shouldn't add three months and a specialized RF team. Small's early customer conversations - with product makers in logistics, environmental monitoring, industrial IoT, and remote patient care - confirmed what drew him to the role. "My early conversations with customers proved to be incredibly inspiring, ultimately cementing my decision to join Blues," he said at the announcement. He describes Blues as a "transformation machine" - the kind of platform that lets a team of five ship what used to require a team of fifty.

The $25M Sequoia-led round announced alongside his arrival brought Blues' total to $115M. It's a number that reflects both the ambition and the problem: enterprise IoT connectivity is genuinely hard, and the market has been waiting for someone to commoditize the plumbing the same way AWS commoditized servers. Small's job is to turn a compelling product into a lasting platform - something he has done, at varying scales, three times before.

The pattern goes back further than most people realize. Before Evernote, before Telefonica, before TokBox, there was Apple. Small arrived in Cupertino in 1989 as a research scientist and senior engineer in the Human Interface Group - a team that existed to figure out what computing would feel like, not just what it would do. In 1991, working with a programmer named Eric Chen in Apple's Advanced Technology Group, he co-conceived QuickTime VR. The technology let users navigate photographic panoramas with a mouse - virtual reality built from stills, half a decade before anyone had coined the phrase "metaverse." It was technically elegant, culturally early, and a little forgotten. Exactly the kind of thing that gets you nine US patents and a reputation for being one step ahead of the moment.

TokBox came next - a Sequoia-backed startup that built the first real-time video communications platform-as-a-service. This was video chat as infrastructure, before Twilio made it obvious. Telefonica eventually acquired TokBox and kept Small on, elevating him to Global Chief Data Officer and a seat on the Executive Committee. He was now responsible for data strategy, global R&D, and new product innovation for more than 300 million customers. It's one of those roles where the scope is so large it almost becomes abstract - except Small tends to make abstract things concrete by going and talking to the people actually using the product.

Listening is the word that follows Ian Small everywhere. And it wasn't always a compliment. Early in his career, performance reviews at Apple repeatedly flagged the same thing: "Ian needs to learn to listen better." The feedback stung enough that he took it seriously. He turned it into a near-obsessive practice - learning to resist the pattern-matching reflex that lets experienced operators dismiss new information too quickly because it looks familiar. "Learn to dismiss nothing," he said in a leadership interview. "That's actually very, very hard to do... pattern matching is a negative where you can dismiss things really quickly, because they seem to match a pattern that you think you know, and then you stop listening." The irony is that this specific act of listening to critical feedback is what unlocked the rest of his career. "I wouldn't be in the role that I am in now," he has said, "if I hadn't learned to overcome this."

Evernote was the proving ground for all of it. When Small took over as CEO in October 2018, he walked into a company drowning in technical debt. The application millions of people relied on for capturing their notes and thoughts had been built in layers, each iteration bolted onto the previous one until the whole thing had become nearly impossible to modify without risking the foundation. Several key executives had departed in August 2018; 54 employees - about 15% of the workforce - were laid off in September. He arrived the following month with a clear diagnosis: the product couldn't evolve until the platform could breathe.

His solution was not incremental. He rebuilt Evernote's platform from scratch - a multi-year, high-stakes technical undertaking that required persuading users to stay patient while the company essentially rebuilt the ship around them while they were sailing on it. The launch of Evernote version 10 in late 2020 was the external signal of an internal transformation that had been years in the making. Small ran Evernote until January 2023, when Italian app company Bending Spoons completed an acquisition and brought in new leadership. He left having done what he came to do: made the platform buildable again.

Post-Evernote, Small joined the board of Lumentum, a NASDAQ-listed manufacturer of optical and photonic products, and Snapdocs, a digital mortgage closing platform. He took on an advisory role at Squint, which builds manufacturing intelligence software for Fortune 500 companies. He was advising, observing, keeping his hands in a few different pots - until Blues surfaced. The company's product, the Notecard, solved a problem Small had seen from multiple angles: hardware teams spending disproportionate engineering cycles on connectivity instead of their actual product. He saw Blues as a chance to invent the future again, and this time partnering with customers to invent theirs.

What makes Blues interesting as a bet is not just the hardware. It is the architecture of the connectivity - a Notecard can route data over cellular, switch to Wi-Fi, fall back to satellite, or hop between carriers without the product maker having to negotiate each relationship. For a solar-powered sensor in a remote field, or a fleet asset tracker crossing borders, or a medical device that cannot afford a dropped connection, this is not a nice-to-have. It is the difference between shipping and not shipping. Small's job is to help more of those product teams get across the line.

He lives in San Francisco and identifies, first and most emphatically, as Canadian. He learned to code at age 12 after receiving a poor grade on a homework assignment - the kind of specific, slightly embarrassing origin story that every technologist has buried somewhere. When he is not building companies or advising boards, he renovates his home, the discipline of precision with power tools apparently scratching the same itch as shipping software. He holds a Bachelor of Applied Science in Engineering Science and a Master of Science in Computer Science, both from the University of Toronto - where, presumably, the homework grades improved.