When Nathan Gray was nine years old, his father brought home a computer. Within days, Nate was teaching himself to code.
He would walk to Radio Shack and buy engineer’s mini notebooks so he could learn enough about electronics to build his own communications circuits. He and his friend experimented with walkie-talkies, testing exactly how far they could stretch the range. When the walkie-talkies fell short, they graduated to CB radios.
“His dad was an outfitter and had a CB radio base station,” Nate says. “So one night he gave me the handheld, he had the base station at his house, and we started talking back and forth. What we didn’t realize is that every trucker in the area was also on those CB radios.”
One evening, they hit an atmospheric bounce without realizing what was happening. From a small town outside Boise, Idaho, they were suddenly talking to truckers crossing from Oregon into California. Four hundred miles away.
"My parents didn't realize any of this was going on," he says. "I told them this years later and they were like, what?"
That kid grew up and joined the Army, where he served eleven years as an electronic warfare technician. He deployed to South Korea and Iraq. His work kept him at the intersection of communications, signals, and problem-solving, the same place he'd been fascinated by since he was running CB radio experiments past his curfew.
But Iraq left marks that took years to surface
During his deployment, his vehicle was hit by indirect fire and blown up. At the time, and for years after, he told himself he was fine.
"When I was younger, I was like, oh, there's nothing wrong with me, I'm gonna be just fine," he says. "But if you talk to my wife, when I came home from Iraq, I was a mess."
The Army, at that point in time, did not want to diagnose soldiers with PTSD. And Nate did not want to admit he needed help. It was a difficult transition for his family, and one that didn't fully come to a head until he was a couple of years into starting his business. The stress of building something from nothing brought everything back up.
"I was in a really dark place and nearly walked away from everything," he says.
What kept him from walking away was the people around him. Friends who saw what was happening. The VIR program through Bunker Labs, where he found other veteran founders going through similar struggles. And, eventually, the realization that the best path through his own pain was to serve other people.
"The best way for me to work through this was actually to serve," he says. "When I was so focused on the business and nothing else, and I wasn't there for my family and I wasn't there for my friends and wasn't there to help be available to serve others, that actually was far more damaging to me from a mental health perspective than anything else."
Today, Nate runs MeshComm Engineering out of Johnstown, Colorado, a small town about an hour north of Denver that's not quite so small anymore. The company solves a problem that he's been thinking about since those CB radio nights: how do you stay connected when you're outside the reach of cellular or internet coverage?
MeshComm works with businesses and organizations operating in rural and remote areas, combining satellite, cellular, and other communications technologies into seamless, lower-cost solutions. The applications range from monitoring water tanks on farms to keeping field workers connected during long drives through coverage dead zones.
"One of my customers right now, his biggest complaint is that if he's driving from point A to point B in a rural area, two thirds of the drive he's outside of coverage," Nate says. "So he's pulled over having conversations with his customer because he knows if he goes down the next hill, he's going to be out of coverage for thirty minutes."
The foundation of MeshComm's work is simple: just connect. Don't worry about the technology behind it. Don't worry about where you are. Just connect.
But getting from a strong idea to a sustainable business has been its own education. Nate has become something of an evangelist for customer development, the process of talking to enough potential customers to find out whether the problem you want to solve is one people will actually pay to have solved.
"When you start a business, you don't actually know whether or not the problem you decided to solve is something that people are willing to pay for," he says.
"You think that they will. You don't actually know that. And the only way you find out is you have to go talk to a lot of people."
He describes a pyramid. At the bottom, everyone who has the problem. Next level up, the people who know they have it. Above that, the people actively looking for a solution. Higher still, the people who've tried to solve it and failed – or succeeded. At the very top: the people who have all of that, plus a budget.
"The budget matters because you can't sell anything if they don't have a budget," he says. "And the first stage of your business, what you need to do is find ten or twenty of those people at the very top. This problem is such a big need that they are willing to do whatever it takes to solve it."
He credits the framework to Steve Blank's book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany, and to his own hard experience of nearly losing his business before he understood the process.
But the moment he describes with the most energy is the moment when customer development starts working. When the demand starts pulling you instead of you pushing.
"Instead of you pushing, the string pulls you," he says. "People start calling you up on a weekly basis saying, hey, I know you're working in this space, what have you got for me? That actually happened to me last week. And it's a really good feeling."
Nate has six children, one son and five daughters, ages seventeen to twenty-seven. His oldest is married with twin daughters of his own. When people raise their eyebrows at the number, he laughs and confirms: yes, six.
Outside of work, he trail runs, rock climbs, hikes, and keeps a telescope for stargazing. He's not great at the outdoor sports, he says, but he loves being outside. He's learning to tolerate the cold, which is an ongoing project for someone who lives near the Colorado mountains.
His advice to founders considering the leap is grounded in the same honesty he brings to talking about his own struggles.
"You're going to have hard times," he says. "There are going to be ups and downs. If money is your only motivation, you're going to quit a year in because it's going to get hard. You need to have a vision for what the world is going to be like after you do this."
"There are going to be some really bad days. One day you're going to feel on top of the world, this is the best thing ever. And the next day you're going to be like, what in the world am I thinking? Why am I the one doing this?"
What carries him through those days now is what's always carried him.
"If I didn't have my faith, if I didn't have my friends and my family, I wouldn't be where we are today," he says. "We wouldn't be talking today."
He learned the hard way that focusing only on the business made everything worse. Serving other people is what brought him back. It still is.
Nathan Gray is the Co-Founder / CEO of MeshComm Engineering, based in Johnstown, Colorado. An Army combat veteran, Nate served eleven years as an electronic warfare technician with deployments to South Korea and Iraq. MeshComm Engineering helps businesses and organizations in rural and remote areas solve connectivity challenges by integrating satellite, cellular, and other communications technologies. Nate is an active participant in the IVMF Ambassador program and a customer development advocate for early-stage veteran founders.