"When I started in this business, we had 35 staff", says Mark Callander, who officially became the new chief executive of the merged 2degrees and Orcon Group on May 20.
Now the combined operation has $1.2 billion annual revenue, some 1800 staff and a gleaming new corporate office.
Things were scrappier earlier on. Callander started with Slingshot in 2004 as marketing director of the CallPlus-owned ISP at a time of trench warfare with Telecom.
CallPlus - owned by Malcolm Dick and his (then) wife Annette Presley had launched New Zealand's first free internet service provider, i4free - which exploited a complex arrangement of interconnection fees - arguably designed to protect the incumbent's dominant position - to leave Telecom picking up the tab.
Telecom was able to strangle i4free, amid a multimillion-dollar High Court fight.
Callander says after a quick weekend huddle, the decision was made to rename it Slingshot, in a David and Goliath reference, as it morphed into a commercial ISP.
Although it won in the courtroom, Telecom lost the PR war. Politically, it was now on the back foot as the government opened a review into "local loop unbundling" or a regulatory change that would give internet providers the right to install their own gear in Telcom exchanges.
In 2006, Presley turned up on the steps of Parliament with 35,000 loaves of bread to illustrate that Telecom's network monopoly was leaving other ISPs with "crumbs".
Others, including the Telecommunications Users Group, also pressed for change - and the push was ultimately successful. CallPlus became the first to unbundle local exchanges in 2010, allowing it to offer cheaper voice and broadband services.
And Telecom, which has operationally split its wholesale and retail operations in 2007, was cleaved into two separate companies (the retailer now known as Spark and network operator Chorus) in 2011.
Callander was promoted to CallPlus CEO in 2010. In 2014, CallPlus bulked up, and solidified its position as the number three player in broadband, by buying the Seeby Woodhouse-founded Orcon Group from Kordia.
In 2015, it was CallPlus's turn to be acquired, as Dick and Presley sold out to Australian telco M2, with Callander named as the head of M2's NZ operations.
In 2016, M2 merged with another Aussie telco, Vocus Group, in a A$3 billion deal. M2 bought another NZ asset to the party: Maxnet - the business ISP and data centre operation it acquired in 2012. Callander was named as the head of Vocus's NZ operations - which included the nationwide fibre network it had bought from FX Networks for $115m in 2014.
In 2017, Vocus bought a small power retailer, Switch Utilities, and started offering bundled power deals to Orcon and Slingshot customers (deals that will soon be extended to 2degrees fixed-line and mobile customers).
In 2018, Callander got a promotion. On top of his continuing role as Vocus NZ CEO, he was appointed as an executive director on Vocus Group's board, and made the head of the group's wholesale operation in Australia - which constituted roughly half its business.
The deals kept coming.
In 2020, Vocus bought Stuff Fibre and its 20,000 customers.
In March 2021, Vocus was named as the provisioning partner for Sky TV's new broadband service (meaning it's Sky owned, badged and marketed, but Vocus puts everything together behind the scenes).
And in April 2021, Vocus was granted consent to build a groundstation for Elon Musk's Starlink in Whangarei - the first of six around NZ as the satellite broadband service quickly found popularity with those living too far from a town or city for UFB fibre, but who were not country enough to get service under the Rural Broadband Initiative.
In June the same year, Vocus Group was bought for A$3.5b by investment bank Macquarie Group and Australia's largest superannuation fund, Aware Super - who set up a joint venture called Voyage Australia to facilitate the deal.
As in all such deals, Callander and other directors tendered their resignations, and Voyage named its own board (a series of Macquarie and Aware executives).
Callander was offered A$8.3m compensation for the cancellation of his long-term incentive shares as the deal went though - contingent on his continued service.
There was talk that Voyage (not to be confused with Seeby Woodhouse's Voyager) would spin off and list Vocus's NZ operation (a project that had already been in the works, with Vocus NZ rebranded to Orcon Group in the process).
But instead, Voyage decided to buy 2degrees in a $1.32b deal, and merge it with Orcon Group.
That deal gained its final approvals in April and closed on May 20. The same day, Callander was confirmed as chief executive of the merged 2degrees and Orcon Group.
The new 2degrees will have its own board - likely including Callandar - although it's not likely to be named for a few weeks.
Similarly, although 2degrees has yet to release its final C-suite lineup, we already know Callander, unsurprisingly, has named his top Vocus NZ lieutenants to key positions. Taryn Hamilton is now 2degrees' chief consumer officer, while Vocus CTO Adrian Dick (one of Malcolm Dick's sons) has been named 2degrees' integration management officer.
2degrees has had a succession of technocrat CEOs who have pushed through a fair share of market disruption and innovation, including being first-to-market with the likes of free Australasian roaming, carryover data and, most recently, Wi-Fi calling - but have also had short, relatively anonymous tenures (the telco's only real personality, founder Tex Edwards, was pushed out in 2012).
Callander, by contrast, has made a career of front-foot manoeuvring.
He was only hours into his new job when he announced a new unlimited 5G wireless broadband plan, plus a new push that will see home-and-contents insurance bundled with your internet.
"There's nothing wrong with being a challenger brand." And he told the first assembly of staff from the merged companies Slingshot and Orcon will disappear as brands over the next 12-months, but the David and Goliath mentality that has served Callander so well over the past two decades will persist.
But there's one key difference. Where Slingshot had only a handful of staff, and essentially no stuff it could call its own, the new 2degrees has a nationwide mobile network (which, unlike its rivals, it has no plans to sell) and 4200km of fibre - assets that Callander says put it toe-to-toe with Spark and Vodafone.
"It's very unusual for a player with 20 per cent market share to have equivalence in infrastructure," the 2degrees boss says.
The underdog now looks fit to take on the big dogs.
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