We recently connected with Tim Sylvester and have shared our conversation below.

Tim, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today How did you come up with the idea for your business?

Our entire economy depends on roads. Roads are one of humanity’s earliest inventions, and most important. 100 years ago, Americans began funding road improvements with public money to enable adoption of the auto, creating enormous growth and prosperity. But since then, our investment in roads have languished, and our roads get worse year by year. At this point we need to completely rebuild more than half our inventory. Nobody seems to know how to do a better job, or care.

I realized that connected, electric, and autonomous vehicles would need network services from roads – communications, data, charging, navigation – in ways that can’t be delivered from the roadside, or overhead. These are commercial demands that can’t reasonably be provided using public money. I realized that if the roads delivered services that people would gladly pay for, that the roads could become financially self-sustaining. And once the roads are paying for their own existence from services, keeping them in good repair becomes a natural action to keep the revenue flowing.

There’s 100 years of unused innovations and improvements in road building and management, along with everything we’ve learned about real estate development, finance, and other industries that have developed in the last 100 years since the public took on the burden of financing roadways. Most of these innovations are unadopted, just sitting there waiting for someone to use them. They aren’t used not because they’re bad, but because they’re not compatible with the public subsidy model we use for road improvements.

This represents trillions of dollars of unfunded road improvement demands; just in the United States the demand is greater than the entire global market for IT. This is a huge untapped opportunity, and one that must be realized for humanity to usefully adopt the benefits of connected, electric, and autonomous vehicles. Whoever figures this out provides the world with an economic model for the next 100 years.

These were the insights that eventually led to the development of Integrated Roadways, our key product Smart Pavement, and now, an entire industry called “digital infrastructure”.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m first generation internet, I grew up online before most people even knew what the internet was. I was dialing into BBS’s at 7, I remember when HTML was first published, I watched the first dot-com boom from a 13″ CRT in my parents living room. Being online as a child may be commonplace now, but it was extremely rare in the 90s.

When it was time to join the workforce, I would have loved to have been a part of the internet boom, but I was a poor kid from rural Missouri. What internet jobs were there in the late 90s in Missouri? None that I could get. So I went into construction, because it was available and paid relatively well.

I came to realize how outdated and archaic construction is, how slow to change and risk averse. I also realized that connected, electric, and autonomous vehicles would require services from roads, the same way that computers transformed the work desk and cellular transformed phones, all of which eventually transformed our phone system into the internet. I also could tell that contractors wouldn’t be able to develop the necessary technologies themselves, nor could public agencies.

By this time, Cisco was one of the largest companies on the planet, supplying technologies to transform phone systems into internet systems. I saw a huge opportunity to be a technology developer, vendor, and operator for digital infrastructure, and it seemed like nobody else saw the demand (at the time). I started Integrated Roadways to do much like Cisco was doing, except for road networks – develop and provide the technologies the industry needed for digital transformation.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

I was preparing to graduate from my engineering program, and was sitting at the table with my mom and grandma after Thanksgiving dinner. They asked me what I planned to do next, and I told them I wanted to start Integrated Roadways. But being a student, unemployed, broke, the deck was stacked against me. They asked me what I needed, and I said time to figure things out.

“Will $1,000 buy you enough time?” my mom asked. It’s a good start, I told her. My grandma said she’d put in $1,000 too. My sister happened by as they were writing checks and asked what this was all about. She chipped in another thousand and asked me to take over her husband’s house while they moved away for her doctorate. I left with $3k and a place to live, I ended up staying there almost 8 years.

I turned that $3k into $10k, then $50k, and eventually closed our Angel round with $500k. It was all in bits and pieces from friends and family. The more people saw others participating, the more people wanted to participate. The hardest part wasn’t finding people to contribute, it was having the courage to ask them to help, and the confidence that I could follow through on the commitments I was making to them. As someone who never really had any means, getting someone to write me a check for thousands of dollars on the promise that I would do stuff in the future felt like a swindle even though it wasn’t. I’d always been a laborer, paid after services were rendered, and it took a lot of work to get over the mental obstacles to take money from people for things that hadn’t happened yet.

At this point, 10 years later, we’ve raised around $5m, almost all of it from friends and family small investors. We’ve grown from a one-man-army to a 25 person team of experts. A few weeks ago, we signed a term sheet with a professional investor that will more than triple our total capitalization, with options for more. We’ve just filed our paperwork to convert to a Delaware C-corp, and will be issuing shares to our investors once the Series A closes.

Someone asked me if I felt accomplished by that. No, I told them, no more so than someone should feel accomplished that they’re lined up for a race. Getting here is only a start. I won’t feel accomplished until all of my investors are repaid and my friends and family never have to worry about money again.

We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.

I have a suit coat that has embroidered under the lapel, “It’s Complicated.” Our work pulls together so many disparate industries that have never had significant interaction before. We need suppliers from around the globe, producing specialty products that are custom made for each order. No single organization can do what we do by themselves, at least, not at the moment.

I once helped a DOT secure a grant for a project, and the night before the project was awarded, they rewrote the specs to disqualify us. The next day at the bid review, I had an argument with the project manager who rewrote the spec at the last minute – as it happened, the only company in the world who qualified for her new version ‘just so happened’ to be represented by her former boss. Weird how that works.

After the very public dispute, a few guys approached me and asked what that was about. I explained my side, and they asked if they could help make sure I didn’t get squeezed like that again. They represented a precast production facility that has become a close and prized partner to us.

It’s not just our manufacturer, though. It’s all of our suppliers, the engineering firms and contractors we work with, our software vendors, IT suppliers, and all of the other companies that contribute to our work. We had to find companies that could supply for every aspect of what we need, whether modifying their existing products or creating entirely new stuff for us.

We’ve found that explaining what we do, and the kind of help we need to advance the company and our products, works surprisingly well. Because of how complex our products and supply chain are, there’s less risk of our partners trying to do it without us.

If you’re working on something simpler, like a product that can be molded in plastic from a single manufacturer, you’re in a much more risky position than we are. The complexity of our products adds a lot of safety for us. The risk isn’t zero (one major company has repeatedly tried to copy our work with little success) but it’s much lower than most companies simply due to the nature of what we do. That’ll change once we’re successful, but by then our competitors will be literally years behind us.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.integratedroadways.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/integratedroadways/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/integratedroadways/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/integrated-roadways/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/IntegratedRoads
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@IntegratedRoadways

Image Credits
Integrated Roadways