Free World Dialup

Beginnings in accounting and computing

Pulver began his career in accounting and was hired out of college by a client of his consulting firm, New York-based Margolin, Winer & Evens LLP, in 1984. Within his first year at the company, he convinced his supervisors to offer computer services to clients. Two years later in 1987, while still at the firm, he founded a new business, Spreadsheet Solutions Corp. to market add-ins for Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft Excel. Margolin, Winer & Evens invested initial venture capital in this company. Pulver's ownership and management of Spreadsheet Solutions Corp. provided the next step in his career when he sold the company to Cantor Fitzgerald in the early 1990s. As a result of the sale, Pulver and his small team were subsumed into Cantor Fitzgerald's IT department. By the mid 1990s, he had become a vice president of information technology at the company.

Free World Dialup and the establishment of Voice over Internet Protocol

During this time, Pulver became interested in the nascent technology of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). While the earliest forms of this technology were initially developed in the 1970s, it was in the early 1990s that advances in computer technology allowed the first proper software and internet applications to be developed in Israel by VocalTec. The first consumer-level application for VoIP, VocalTec's Internet Phone (IPhone), was launched shortly thereafter in February 1995. Members of the amateur radio community adopted the use of the IPhone program, and Pulver became one of the application's most prominent proponents, speaking on behalf of VocalTec's interests and establishing a mailing list of early users. In September 1995, Pulver teamed first with Izak Jenie, and later Brandon Lucas, to establish an experimental platform for VoIP communications called Free World Dialup. Subscribers to the platform could communicate with one another, but not with others outside the platform. In November, Pulver officially launched Free World Dialup as the world's first internet telephony network, as well as the first true VoIP business venture, incorporating the platform with the IPhone technology. Pulver pursued all of these activities at night while simultaneously holding his day job at Cantor Fitzgerald. Seeking a term to encapsulate these emerging technological applications, he coined the acronym 'VON' (which stood for Voice/Video On the Net), which would later provide both nomenclature for the industry and the origin for many of Pulver's later companies and organizations.

By March 1996, interest in VoIP and Free World Dialup had increased, and 300 companies involved in the telephone and telecommunications industry filed a joint petition with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) requesting that the sale and operation of internet telephony software be banned in the United States, and that the makers of the software be regulated in the same manner as traditional phone companies. Ten days after the petition was filed, Pulver launched his first lobbying organization, the VON Coalition; 110 companies from around the world quickly joined. As leader of the group, Pulver organized the initial opposition to FCC regulation of VoIP. He also wrote a book, The Internet Telephony Toolkit, which offered explanations of the technology and predictions for the industry's future. Pulver's expertise and advocacy led to him being identified as "the internet telephony industry's first celebrity and most vociferous proponent." While becoming more and more involved in these activities, Pulver became disenchanted with his work at Cantor Fitzgerald. In July 1996, after suggesting the company embrace some of the internet innovations he had become involved in, Pulver was fired.

Founding Min-X.com and the evolution of Vonage

In 1998, while simultaneously running the VON Conference and continuing his lobbying work with the Von Coalition, Pulver founded a new venture, Min-X.com, to serve as a VoIP exchange for the purchase and sale of unused carrier minutes. As with traditional telephone services, carriers buy, sell, and trade minutes between one another anonymously to ensure continuous global service and coverage. As opposed to traditional telephone minutes, which are referred to as 'black and white minutes', the minutes used by VoIP applications are called 'purple minutes', a term coined by Pulver. Seeking to expand the company's prospects, he recruited Jeffrey A. Citron and Carlos Bhola to serve as board members. Citron and Bhola each invested $1 million of their own money, and then jointly raised a further $11 million from other backers. With the new financing, the company pivoted to become a VoIP service provider. In 2001, the company changed its name to Vonage. Citron and Bhola subsequently became CEO and president, respectively, while Pulver remained on the company's board until 2002, when he left to focus on a refresh of his first VoIP company, Free World Dialup. Vonage subsequently grew into a leading business communications services and cloud computing company; in November 2021, it was acquired by Ericsson for $6.2 billion.