Steve Flavell’s Second First Company

Before there was LoopUp, there was the possibility of caravan parks. Steve Flavell and Michael Hughes wanted to start a company together. The precise business was still up for discussion. Telecommunications made the shortlist. So did somewhere people might park a caravan. A friendship had produced a commitment before it produced a product.

That order matters. Flavell has spent more than two decades as LoopUp’s co-founder and co-CEO, sharing the title with Hughes while the business around them has changed. It began with a familiar office nuisance: the conference call that nobody quite knew how to control. Today, it helps multinational companies put their telephone services into Microsoft Teams. Between those descriptions lies a rather demanding exercise in starting again.

The caravan parks never happened. The question behind them has proved more durable: what kind of company would these two people want to keep running together?

Choose your partner, then your problem

Flavell’s route to entrepreneurship passed through engineering, oil and consulting. He earned an MEng at St. John’s College, Cambridge, worked at Mobil Oil, and spent five years in strategy consulting with Mars & Co and Monitor Company. Stanford’s MBA programme brought him together with Hughes in the mid-1990s. Flavell graduated in 1997.

Business school carried a personal wager. He had left consulting and borrowed to pay for it. The promised return was partly the possibility of a different life. He subsequently joined the founding team at GoIndustry, an online industrial auction business, becoming an executive vice-president and main board director. It was experience in selling an unfamiliar way of doing something familiar, a useful education for what followed.

By 2003, he and Hughes were ready to work together. Hughes has described how much their earlier startup experiences influenced the decision: the people and the working culture would receive serious attention from the beginning. Even the caravan-park discussion fits that priority. They were choosing colleagues for an uncertain journey, with the destination still negotiable.

Both had engineering and consulting backgrounds. Their preferences inside a company were usefully different. Flavell took the commercial side in London; Hughes took product development and platform operations in San Francisco. The shared title concealed a practical division of labour. Two chief executives, two sets of responsibilities, and an ocean between their desks.

The office ritual nobody enjoyed

Ring2, the business that became LoopUp, was founded in 2003. Its original conferencing service reached the market in 2006. The opportunity was almost comically recognisable: access codes, unidentified voices, late arrivals and somebody’s background noise conducting a rival meeting of its own.

For a host, a telephone conference could feel like managing a room with the lights switched off. You could hear people, but knowing exactly who had arrived required a roll call. A seemingly small gap in the interface created a large gap in confidence. For lawyers discussing sensitive business, that mattered.

LoopUp’s answer included a BlackBerry application that put call controls into the host’s hand. Participants became visible. Background noise could be traced and muted. The premise was straightforward: give people enough information and control to get on with the conversation. The product did not need to turn its users into telecommunications enthusiasts.

Flavell’s explanation of lawyers’ caution was sympathetic. Security and reputation raised the cost of a mistake. What might look like reluctance to adopt technology could be a sensible response to the consequences of a failed meeting. A product for that audience had to earn its place through ordinary reliability.

“The cost of getting things wrong is just too high.”

Steve Flavell, on technology adoption in law firms, 2019

That gives his early product philosophy a human centre. The person hosting an important call already has a job to do. Learning an elaborate new piece of software is an additional assignment, usually arriving at an inconvenient moment. Restraint in the interface can be a form of courtesy.

Twenty-five hires and a change of mind

Flavell’s account of a 2007 hiring decision is less polished than the customary founder victory lap. After raising money, LoopUp quickly recruited around 25 experienced people from the conferencing industry. On paper, the decision sounded sensible. They knew the market. They knew how to sell.

Experience brought habits with it. The recruits were accustomed to selling the established industry’s products; LoopUp needed people who could explain why the established approach should change. Flavell later identified the hiring push as his biggest business mistake. The company rebuilt more gradually around graduates it trained itself.

There is a useful distinction here between knowing a customer and knowing a sales routine. The first can help a new business. The second may make it harder to hear what is different about the product. Flavell’s willingness to describe the mistake gives the subsequent graduate model a practical origin. It emerged from a correction.

By 2017, he was describing commercial “Pods”: small teams of roughly six people, rewarded collectively for new revenue growth. The arrangement put responsibility close to the people doing the work. It also made his interest in company culture concrete. Culture had acquired a staffing policy, a training method and a way of distributing incentives.

A thoroughbred meets the stock market

LoopUp’s 2016 AIM flotation raised £8.5 million in new money. For Flavell, going public also offered credibility with customers buying an important business service. A supplier’s staying power matters when its product sits in the middle of a client conversation. The listing was part of the sales argument as well as the financing plan.

His language about growth was revealing. He favoured building a “thoroughbred” and resisted growth at any cost. Processes, efficiency and control over the company’s direction were recurring concerns. It is a less theatrical ambition than promising to conquer a market, although there is plenty of ambition in wanting a business to keep its footing.

The story did not end at the stock-exchange door. LoopUp acquired conferencing provider MeetingZone in 2018. In 2024, it left AIM and returned to private ownership. Its investor Adara describes that decision as a response to the capital requirements of the next phase: the board believed private funding offered a better route.

Seen together, the listing and delisting resist a tidy success narrative. Public ownership had served one set of purposes. A different business required a fresh financing judgment. A milestone can be useful without becoming a permanent address.

When your product becomes a feature

The more fundamental change happened in the product’s place in working life. As organisations adopted broad collaboration platforms, meetings became one capability inside a much larger software package. Microsoft Teams combined activities that had once been purchased separately. The market for a standalone conferencing service became a harder place to operate.

Flavell has described the resulting decline plainly. LoopUp needed a new service. Years of work on the original proposition could not guarantee that customers would continue buying it in the same way. An established company had encountered a problem normally associated with a startup: deciding what it should sell.

His shorthand for the present business is “product number two.” The phrase is appealingly unceremonious. It acknowledges that a company can have a long history while its current offer is comparatively young. It also leaves room for the difficulty of the transition, rather than treating reinvention as an effortless change of vocabulary.

The enduring partnership becomes more interesting at this point. It is one thing to divide responsibilities while a product is growing. It is another to retain that arrangement while reconsidering the product itself. Flavell and Hughes have continued with the commercial and technical division that gave their shared leadership a practical basis.

The phone bill grows a passport

LoopUp’s current proposition starts with a multinational company’s administrative problem. A business may operate across borders while buying telephone services country by country. Each supplier can bring another agreement, support process and management portal. The organisation is global; the paperwork has remained stubbornly local.

Flavell wants LoopUp to consolidate that arrangement through one provider, integrated into Teams. Its published service coverage extends to more than 100 countries. The attraction is easy to understand without a diagram of a telephone network: fewer supplier relationships to coordinate, with a consistent way to manage the service.

The work behind that apparent simplicity remains particular. Telephone numbers must be managed. Local requirements still apply. Service quality and support still matter. Moving a call into a familiar application does not abolish the obligations involved in making it connect. In his 2026 public discussions, those operational details remain part of the argument.

This makes the second product an interesting companion to the first. The early LoopUp gave a meeting host a clearer view of a call. The current business offers an organisation a clearer way to oversee telephony across countries. Both start with a customer attempting to coordinate something unnecessarily awkward.

A business worth another go

Flavell describes leading by example, staying involved in the business and being open with the team. His advice to prospective founders includes getting an early version into customers’ hands and learning from the response. There is an engineer’s preference for testing in that approach, and a salesperson’s respect for what customers actually choose.

The documented story contains enough reversals to give that advice weight: the expensive business-school decision, the hiring correction, a public listing, a return to private ownership and a different product. None makes the next choice automatic. Each requires a judgment about which experience to keep and which habit to relinquish.

Caravan parks remain an entertaining footnote. The more consequential choice was the person Flavell wanted beside him before either founder knew precisely what they would build. They eventually found a problem in the conference room. Years later, they found another in the multinational phone system. The partnership has lasted long enough to take both calls.