Jeff Gower

Somewhere in the utility closet of a hospital, a factory, or a 40-story office tower, there is a line item on the phone bill that has not changed in decades. It powers the elevator emergency phone. The fire alarm panel. A fax machine that still, improbably, matters. It runs on copper, it costs a fortune, and the carriers that maintain it would very much like to stop. Jeff Gower built a company around that line item.

Gower is the CEO of MarketSpark, headquartered in Bannockburn, Illinois, and its whole reason for existing fits inside four letters: POTS, or Plain Old Telephone Service. The company's public social handles are, with admirable honesty, @potsreplacement. This is a business that named itself after the thing it intends to make obsolete.

The pitch is not a gadget. It is a subtraction. Across the United States, more than 30 million analog copper lines wind through roughly 6 million commercial buildings, and they are being decommissioned - quietly, steadily, and faster every year. When the copper goes dark, the safety systems attached to it go dark too, unless something reliable takes its place. MarketSpark's answer is a managed, cloud-enabled wireless service, 4G LTE now and 5G-ready, that keeps those critical lines talking after the wire is pulled. Under Gower, the company has set itself the task of replacing more than 36 million lines across North America.

He does not sell hardware. He sells the promise that the important call connects.

The distinction matters to Gower. Plenty of vendors will sell you a box - an LTE router, a cellular dialer - and call it a day. MarketSpark's argument is that a box is not a strategy. The company frames POTS replacement as a managed service: remote diagnostics, line monitoring, real-time alerts, a cloud dashboard, and carrier-agnostic connectivity that does not care whether the signal rides on one network or another. His co-founder Jake Jacoby put the philosophy plainly: "We not only update our customer's businesses; we future proof them." Don't swap the hardware. Future-proof the building.

That framing is what convinced the money. In April 2021, MarketSpark closed a $7 million Series B round led by IDT Corporation, with participation from the Goldie Group and Klein Enterprises. IDT's CEO Shmuel Jonas and Klein Enterprises' CEO Daniel Klein joined the board. Jonas called the platform "a unique solution to the POTS replacement problem." The same month, the company announced it was delivering LTE/5G connectivity for POTS replacement using Cradlepoint routers - proof that the plumbing was real, not a pitch deck.

The road to copper ran through a construction site.

Gower did not start in telecom. He started in buildings. His first title, in 1992, was Project Engineer at Turner Construction Company. He has an engineering degree from Union College and, later, an MBA in Supply Chain and Operations from MIT Sloan, plus two executive certifications from the same school - one in managing the extended supply chain, one in developing technology and product strategy. There is a tidy irony in the arc: he began his career on the sites where copper lines were installed, and he now spends his days figuring out how to pull them out.

In between, he built things that scaled. At VHB in the mid-1990s he created the firm's first knowledge management platform, an early tell of an engineer who liked to systematize the invisible machinery of an organization. He consulted at Braun Consulting, ran business development at USBuild.com during the dot-com surge, then joined Siemens Mobile in 2001 as VP of Supply Chain Management, helping launch products in North America.

The real education came at Brightstar. In 2004 he founded and ran the company's APAC region, building a wireless distribution and services operation from the ground up in a part of the world where the mobile market was exploding. By 2010 he was Global President of Services, taking the carrier service model he had proven in Asia and pushing it into new regions. He later served as President of North America. It was a decade-long masterclass in the unglamorous mechanics of mobility: logistics, carrier relationships, service at scale - exactly the muscles MarketSpark would later need.

In 2014 he moved to Samsung Electronics as EVP of Product Sales and Services, launching a portfolio that included Gift Cards, Loyalty and Membership programs, and Deals and Offers. In 2017 he took his first CEO seat at Trux, a construction-materials logistics startup - a return, briefly, to the world of building sites. Then, in 2020, he took over MarketSpark and found the problem that seems to fit him best: a boring, essential, enormous piece of infrastructure that everyone relies on and nobody wants to think about.

Why the boring problem is the good problem.

There is a certain kind of founder who chases the flashy market. Gower runs at the opposite: the market so unglamorous that most people don't notice it's a market at all. The copper sunset is not a maybe. Carriers are actively retiring analog lines, regulators have cleared the runway, and every building affected has systems that legally cannot simply go silent. That combination - a forced transition, a hard deadline, and life-safety stakes - is the sort of thing an operations-and-supply-chain mind finds beautiful. It is a problem with edges you can measure.

What makes Gower worth watching is not that he found a clever technology. It's that he read the fine print. He looked at the line item everyone else scrolled past and saw a company. The dial tone is dying, and someone has to make sure nothing important dies with it.