Get ready to have your mind opened to the immense opportunities in saving energy for 5G networks, and the lure and challenges of entrepreneurship and startups, with former M.I.T. Professor Joel Dawson, CEO of Talking Heads Wireless
Joel, a founding CEO in the startup world, will share his journey from academia to entrepreneurship, highlighting the people who are driving advancements in this field and insights into how to scale your startup from a better mousetrap to a player in a huge market like Telecommunications.
We'll be shifting gears to address the elephant in the room - energy and its critical role in communication. With exponential data traffic growth and increasing concerns about the environment, we'll discuss the pressing need for smarter energy consumption at the 5G tower itself. We'll also delve into the role of semiconductors, software and grid investments in enhancing energy efficiency, and how it could impact businesses and the environment.
Whether you're a seasoned entrepreneur, a budding business owner, or someone interested how 5G and power intersect, this episode is bound to leave you energized.
Want to scale your edge compute business and learn more? Subscribe here and visit us at https://edgecelsior.com.
Get ready to have your mind opened to the immense opportunities in saving energy for 5G networks, and the lure and challenges of entrepreneurship and startups, with former M.I.T. Professor Joel Dawson, CEO of Talking Heads Wireless
Joel, a founding CEO in the startup world, will share his journey from academia to entrepreneurship, highlighting the people who are driving advancements in this field and insights into how to scale your startup from a better mousetrap to a player in a huge market like Telecommunications.
We'll be shifting gears to address the elephant in the room - energy and its critical role in communication. With exponential data traffic growth and increasing concerns about the environment, we'll discuss the pressing need for smarter energy consumption at the 5G tower itself. We'll also delve into the role of semiconductors, software and grid investments in enhancing energy efficiency, and how it could impact businesses and the environment.
Whether you're a seasoned entrepreneur, a budding business owner, or someone interested how 5G and power intersect, this episode is bound to leave you energized.
Want to scale your edge compute business and learn more? Subscribe here and visit us at https://edgecelsior.com.
When you ask people what Edge Compute is, you get a range of answers Cloud Compute in DevOps, with devices and sensors, the semiconductors outside the data center, including connectivity, ai and a security strategy. It's a stew of technologies that's powering our vehicles, our buildings, our factories and more. It's also filled with fascinating people that are passionate about their tech, their story and their world. I'm your host, pete Bernard, and the Edge Celsius show makes sense of what Edge Compute is, who's doing it and how it can transform your business and you. So let's get started. Yeah, no, it's the time of year where it's like cold, rainy and dark. That's basically, yeah, like. If you're not into that, this is not a good place to be.
Joel:Yeah, no, are you from Seattle, or did you?
Pete:No, I'm from New Jersey originally, I think I mentioned I went to school in Boston. I lived in Boston for about seven years and we still have a house actually out on Cape Cod, so I'm back there at least two, three times a year. But yeah, I've been out here almost 20 years. Well, I've been on the West Coast, for you know, longer than that Silicon Valley before that. But yeah, no, I miss the East Coast.
Joel:Yeah, there's some nice things about it. I was shocked the first time I was in Seattle when the sun was out Like it is a shockingly beautiful city.
Pete:Oh yeah.
Joel:I mean it's beautiful anyway, but like when the sun is shining, I mean it's unreal.
Pete:Yeah, no, it is, and the surrounding areas and all the waterways and the islands and it is a fantastic place. Yeah, when the weather is good, it's fantastic. But then that's why we really appreciate our summers, because we usually get a pretty decent summer and everyone like wishes it would just keep going and then this happens. So, whatever, there is seasonality here. It's just kind of a weird seasonality. It's not like the East Coast winter thing, fall thing.
Joel:Yeah, one last thing about this when I lived on the West Coast, the one thing that I missed about the East Coast was the fall. Right, you don't get that kind of explosion of color type thing, but otherwise the West Coast was amazing.
Pete:Yeah, yeah, I was actually down in the Bay Area on Monday, tuesday and I'd lived there a long time and all our kids were born down there in San Francisco and yeah, it was nice driving around. I was in Pleasanton, I was in Sunnyvale, you know it was like San Francisco and it was sunny out and it was like you know, it's like oh. I remember this is pretty cool.
Pete:But no something about the East Coast, the kind of the seasonality of it and it's got some I don't know some history and gravitas to it that you don't necessarily get in other parts of the country. And you've been there. So I noticed that you were, you're an MIT guy and are you from Boston originally.
Joel:No, I grew up in Virginia. Oh okay, and I was there because my father was a military officer. He's in the Army, so we know we moved around. I was actually born in Kansas Military base there, and then you know what his last assignment was at the Pentagon before he retired, and so we lived in Northern Virginia and then when he retired we just stayed there. So I grew up, you know, kind of from elementary school on, you know, in Virginia.
Pete:I see Interesting yeah, but you've been in Boston for a long time now.
Joel:I have Now we. I came to Boston to go to MIT as a college student, you know, and then, you know, went out to the West Coast for graduate school right, but came back to join the faculty, you know, in 2004. And I've no longer in the faculty at MIT, but I've been, we've been in Boston ever since.
Pete:Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's a cool city. My daughter's actually going to be you right now. She's a sophomore, so we still have that regular connection. Yeah, it's my brother went to MIT. Actually, so he's two years older than me. I was thinking about this the other day. I was like really smart for my parents to have us go to two schools and basically the same place, because it was really easy for them to visit Right. But now he's been. He's been in Detroit forever.
Joel:So he was a mechanical engineering guy Right. So, yeah.
Pete:So you've been been there for a while and I noticed and we'll talk about what you've been up to You're working with some, some MIT alums as well. Yeah, one thing I noticed from your LinkedIn. Oh actually, why don't we start with? Like? This is the thing I always do we just start talking and then I don't introduce anybody. So why don't we start with, joel? Why don't you kind of introduce yourself and kind of give everyone kind of your one kind of your origin story?
Joel:Okay, all right, my name is Joel Dawson and you know I kind of started my professional life as an academic, that's almost true. I accepted a, you know, professor position, position at MIT, but I was this was in the really early 2000s and I had an opportunity to be on the founding team of a startup company, which is just the most exciting thing to me. So, right, right, we deferred starting my academic appointment for a year to kind of be with that company, and which was very formative. We can kind of talk about that. But then I came to, you know, mit to teach and you know, ultimately, you know, we wound up developing a technology for, you know, the wireless space that we wanted to commercialize, and so I wound up, I wound up leaving MIT to be the founding CTO of that company.
Joel:I see, you know we sold. That comes out. There's a big adventure. But we went ahead with a happy ending. We sold the company to Nokia, at least for one base station stuff in 2016. And, you know, kept a part of the company alive for kind of Wi Fi and handset, you know, and then we sold that to Murata in 2021. Right, okay, okay, so I was as part of the Nokia sale. I was there for three years left in 2019, and it's been kind of incubating a new company called Talking Hats Wireless Kind of ever since. So that's what we are.
Pete:So you've been sort of doing the entrepreneurial thing since the beginning. I mean, it was a it reminded me of there's someone named Scott Galloway, who's kind of a very kind of a prolific podcaster, professor at NYU, and he was talking about his kind of career journey, how he started. He did a brief stint in Goldman Sachs in which he realized he just didn't like working with like other people and like in a group setting, and so he's just was an entrepreneur from that point onward and it sounds like you've been sort of on that track as well. I mean, what is it about the entrepreneurial thing that is so attractive?
Joel:Yeah, you know, I am surprised to hear myself say that I've been a serial entrepreneur, because that was never the plan, you know, and that is you know. I would hear people say that I always thought it was kind of false, modest, but that's how it was. I went to graduate school because my dream was to work at Bell Labs, you know, and that's a good one. Yeah, you know. And then you know when? When we got to, but when I finished my PhD and, like the early 2000s, bell Labs was just about gone, right.
Pete:So it was real nice.
Joel:It's what in the world?
Pete:Telecordia kind of broke up into little pieces and stuff right, yeah, yeah, and they kind of, they kind of ran out of funding too.
Joel:I think I think you know Bell Labs never made business sets, right, you know and you know. But they were, they had a really good run. You know where it was. They were just funded like crazy anyway, and so that was. But you know, I, I guess what's most attractive to me about startup companies if you've got a new idea, it's really, really hard to bring it into the world any other way. Right, you know it's I, you know, when I was a professor I loved that too. But your primary mode of getting ideas out is papers, which you always have a fantasy of someone's gonna read the paper, get inspired, do the work to do the product and give you the credit. Right, of course, and that is just not how the world works. But if you're kind of a young academic, that's how you think it works and that's what you're so passionate about, kind of writing those papers. And then when you are in a big company, it is just so hard to go in a new direction even if you're the.
Joel:CEO, right, sure, sure, you're the CEO. But if you're not a CEO, there are just so many kind of I call them antibodies that just react.
Pete:Right exactly, it's better than a conspiracy, it's like a well, I felt that too. I mean I did startup stuff in the Bay Area for a while, like five person company, 25 person company. I would consider those to be start-up-y. And then, coming to Microsoft, I consider myself an entrepreneur at Microsoft, so trying to do disruptive things but leveraging a big company. And you're right, it's like there's antibodies, there's a lot of inertia there.
Pete:There's a kind of classic innovators dilemma which is we're making a bunch of money doing this other thing and now you want me to do this and that means I have to do less of that and it's really hard to get it over the hump to compete. So, yeah, I totally get it Like having that singular focus to get your innovation out in the market. That being said, right, I mean, as an entrepreneur you don't have the resources. You hopefully have some funding, but to kind of break through, like I can imagine, we'll talk about what you guys are working on, which is really cool, but relative to the amount of attention that Erickson and Nokia and these other folks get in the market, it's tough to break through.
Pete:So, but it seems like you've been trying to trying to fight the good fight in the entrepreneurial side for a while, so that's pretty impressive.
Joel:Yeah, yeah, thanks. Now it's not easy in any space, kind of where you are, no matter where you are. And I remember when we sold to Nokia and I was at Nokia my first couple of months there, I was like at last I'm in a big company with lots of resources, on the will to run, and the kind of reality is different. I mean it's they have specific to the talking head story. I mean you look at kind of the Erickson's and the Nokia's of the world.
Joel:I mean they have they're strong in a lot of ways. They have a lot of brand equity, they have a lot of money, they've got a lot of trust in the industry. That's right. What is difficult for them is that they have kind of lots and lots of products and lots of lots of kind of inertia. It's actually very difficult for them to react to a sudden change in direction in certain ways. And the way that they deal with this is they work very hard to build up that inertia in the industry so that they decide like what can they do easily, and that they go to standards bodies, they go to compliance offices, they carry, they make sure that everyone is receptive to what they can deliver that works until it doesn't.
Pete:Yeah, exactly. No, you're right. And kind of the black swan or whatever, the meteor as that comes in. That disruption is really hard to manage these big companies struggle with that but yeah, they have a lot of inertia.
Pete:The inertia builds a lot of competitive leverage. It's a moat really. It's hard for people to break in because of these companies that have and whether that's in the wireless space or automotive space or telco space, whatever, it's just that energy that they've built up, that momentum. That's hard to sort of stop. And so, yeah, it's all heading in the right direction. It's great. But, like you said, something comes along that's disruptive. They kind of they can't really hit the parking brake and kind of do a 180. That's right, that's right, that's right.
Joel:We're in 19. And I've been thinking about this a lot. I mean, I think it's with how do you kind of step into the ring like that with competitors that are big, because if you've got the timing wrong, that is properly described as a suicide mission. It's just not going to work. So the bet that we're making with it, the opportunity that I see with talking against wireless, is that so we're talking against wireless for your audience.
Joel:What one of our big value ads is kind of very low power consumption radios at the top of the tower. Everybody's talking about power consumption for 5G and, as it happens, it's the radio at the top of the tower that is far and away the dominant power consumer. So that's the thing that you want to hit. And if you look at the literature that's kind of coming out from the incumbents, that's the part that they're not hitting. But everything's about the RAN and the network and turning radios off when you're not using them, which will help. But it's not the thing, but the window of opportunity.
Joel:I feel like and this probably applies to a lot of startup companies no matter what idea you have, a good time to jump in is when your solution can save or make a lot of money for these incumbents. Everybody knows that the carriers are really kind of awful customers, but for the first time in the history of wireless communications they're keeping track of their energy bill because it's got their OPEX so high that it's hitting their short-term profits. So that is a unique opportunity. That is that is. You know, all of these other kind of relationships are really. They're still strong and the resistance is still there, but the possibility of a breakthrough. Suddenly you could get the accountants on your side. Yeah, I was gonna say, you get the.
Pete:CFO, that's right, telling the CEO or the CTO hey, take a look at these folks. That's right. Yeah, no, I agree. I think that I think the super strong value problem will talk about what you're doing, because I think there's a lot of Conversation around. You know energy usage these days yeah, a lot of it is around AI, right, and the Incredible amount of power that it's required to. You know, write a cat poem or draw a cool picture which nobody realizes that and there's not enough electricity to even.
Pete:You know, get that kind of half the number of workloads that people want. But on your end, you know 5g, which has now been sort of proliferating for years now has mostly been about speeds and feeds and like it's faster and it's lower latency and it's, it's awesome, awesomeness. But you know that comes at a cost and the infrastructure cost. But now the operational cost, and in a world where a lot of public grids are struggling to even support their residential customers, nevermind Data centers, and there's a lot of moratoriums on data centers, now it's like, well, how much power is left over for for other utilities and capabilities, like 5g, which are Now kind of foundational and fundamental? So what you're doing is you're basically getting a lot more functionality out of the same amount of electricity.
Joel:That's, yeah, that's a good way to look at it. Let's get away, look at it and I think, uh, you know kind of also for you know kind of for your listeners, the, the question out there is you know, why is the energy kind of important in communications now? And it wasn't before? Right, they've always been electronic like, didn't they consume energy, you know? And it turns out that it did, of course, but the thing that has flat footed, you know, really the whole industry Is, uh, you have to, you know, kind of look back and realize that you know data traffic and energy consumption go one to one.
Joel:Hmm, now there's a certain number of jewels that you have to spend in order to send a bit as it happens. Yes, very tactical reasons for that, but that that's just true, you know. And so If you look at data traffic over the last 20 years, that has been An exponential rise 20 per year. Yeah, it is a lot of video. All video. All video.
Pete:That hurts, like 80 video or something like that, some crazy number.
Joel:Yeah, I think that's what it is, that's what it is. And so so you know, and an exponential rise is very tough for us to keep track of as human beings. Right, if you know a successful long-term investor, you know, it's just, you know you're poor, you're poor, you're poor, and then you can retire. That's what an exponential rise feels like. So in the data, in communications for at&t, power doesn't matter, power doesn't matter. Holy cow, my short-term profits, you know, um, and it's, it's, it's.
Joel:Uh, I, you know, I feel like there's kind of a broader trend. I feel like we, you know, with the, with the energy problem, you know, kind of, in the world, we spent a lot of energy. You know coming up with, you know, ways to produce more energy, the solar wind, and they have done a phenomenal job. They've hit it out of the park. Solar has gone from being utterly impractical to, you know, something that's going on houses. But what we haven't done a good job of is creating machines that treat energy as a precious resource, right on the consumption side, right the consumption side.
Pete:Yeah, yeah, no, I agree, and it's, it's been there. There's two parts to it. There's, um, well, there's also the move to replace, you know, kind of fossil fuel based energy with renewable energy. So there's all that, yeah, and that's a whole thing. And then there's the just, you know, dramatic increase in the production of energy to keep up with all of our electronic habits and now our AI's and 5Gs and everything else and streamings, right, um. But yeah, on the consumption side, and that's where I think you know and this is a little bit existential is like, as a people, we don't do a good job with our consumption, like that's just can't handle it.
Pete:The way is we just consume too much all the time and even if the data is hitting us right in the face, we don't stop. So the only way to really put a dent in that is to get a lot smarter about the things that are consuming energy and making them a lot smarter. And if they can if we can cut their energy consumption by 50 percent, then we can still behave like the the folks that we are and Reduce consumption. I think that's the only answer.
Pete:Yeah that's what you're doing, but also semiconductors, and you know automobiles and, uh, you know machinery and even, like the, the investments that are happening in the grid. We talked about the, the public grid, which is, in some cases, like in the us. A lot of the transmission infrastructure in the us for electricity is 50, 60 years old. Right, it's, it's ancient, it's designed for on-demand energy, not kind of storage of energy, and it's not very well instrumented, and so making all that super efficient is part of the equation as well. Yeah, but but the end of the day, you look at the big, you know. You look at the folks that are really the big criminals in terms of consuming energy, and so what you're going after is the 5G infrastructure is a pretty big energy hog at this point, and that's you know. If you can do that, like you said, there's obviously the existential benefits of just being better citizen of energy in terms of consuming less.
Pete:But, practically speaking, all of these telcos have margins and have profit numbers in need to hit. There's only so many subscriber ads they're going to get, can't lay off everybody. They're trying. And so here's another way for the CFO to say, wow, we could. We could really cut our energy bill. Be a good citizen, so it's good. And also you know, hit the, hit, the margins in a very positive way yeah.
Joel:Yeah, and if you want to enter the space of the startup company, you want to be the only way they can do that, one of the only ways you know, and because the resistance that you face otherwise is just so strong, you know, and that's but, that's right, you want to be the only alternative to solving this problem ideally.
Pete:Yeah, you know so we're, we're here. So are you working at the US market or Europe markets or worldwide? Or I mean, as a startup, I imagine you don't have kind of like a 1500 person sales force. So what's the, what's the strategy to scale this thing?
Joel:Yeah, yeah. So we've had to be very opportunistic. We got our first customer. The story again kind of goes back to my time, you know, kind of you know, working with Nokia. We had a you know the company that Nokia bought my last company with a called Ada devices, and so we had, you know, outfitted a Nokia Radiohead with our new technology. The first customer trial that I did was at you know a carrier called Alisa. They're like the Verizon.
Pete:Yeah right, you know, very innovative, alisa very exactly because they're in Finland, I don't know.
Joel:There's a whole thing there, but they're out, yeah, yeah, it all helps, it all helps, it helps. So, you know, the trial, the trial went very well, they were impressed and but you know, he pulled me aside at the end. He looked me in the eyes and you know what, joel, tell your managers at Nokia that we are convinced it works and we want it Right In terms of like being. You know, because he knew the kind of feedback that I needed to get in order to move things in Right. So that was, you know, I was impressed by that moment.
Joel:And then I started to get talking to it. It's why I was able to reach out to him directly. And they have. They've given us our first contract, right, it's scheduled to do field trials, you know, and the field trial sort of come to how you scale the thing. But the field, that first field trial, is that's where the earthquake happens, right, that is where you know you're in Finland. It's one of the fastest 5G networks, you know, in Europe.
Joel:Okay, so this isn't a kind of a hey, we're saving energy play. This is these people. They take, you know, calls like this on their cellular. You know, network, yeah, that's serious about capacity Culture. Yeah, that's right. So they don't want to care about energy, but very few people actually do. What they care about is capacity right, so we would be you know it's what we and they've agreed to do a comparative trial. So they'll put our radio head, they'll put a standard radio head on the same.
Joel:So you know the pitch is less, hey, you know, believe what talking is. Wireless is saying Right, right and more. Do a live trial in the network, not in the lab. We'll come back to that Live trial and you know, measure the power consumption and measure that we don't lose any bits Right, and the only thing that we're asking of you is that you believe your own measurements. Okay, right, I mean it's. You know the radio is rocket science. You know you have vested interest telling you kind of, you know, arguing back and forth. So, you know, and you don't know me very well, you know, been working with the other guys for years. So, right, right, all we ask is that you do your own measurements and believe your own measurements. Hmm, you know. So you can imagine now the press release Pete from that.
Joel:Right, you know, this little shit startup company, you know, goes to Helsinki, cuts the power in half in one of the fastest 5G networks in the world, and there's no. Oh well, it's in the lab. We don't know what happens when it's deployed, right, you know. Oh, you know, we don't know if it can be manufactured. That's why we're going for, you know, kind of the lie all the way, the risk-taking proof of concept, prototype, right, right, right, that's so the other part of your question, you know, really is just sort of being, you know, opportunistic, and it would be natural to kind of focus on the US carriers. Except for, you know, even for US carriers, even for among carriers around the world. They're pretty slow and pretty resistant, I know yeah.
Pete:That's what I hear.
Joel:Yeah, so we're actually talking right now. We're in this early stage where any deployment is a good deployment for us. Sure, you know. So, if we, you know, we're talking with one customer that has a lot of deployments in Africa with sort of solar-powered base stations today imagine that press release, yeah, and then the WagonGeds wireless, you know, kind of cuts the cost of the world broadband, right. So wherever we can get and there are lower tier carriers in the US who are also hungry as well Sure, so where we want to get it, the way that we scale, you know now, is that we, you know, first lower our heads and do these kind of early deployments, right, so you know, we get the Wall Street Journal to start asking why US carriers are not using the only US based supplier and equipment.
Joel:You know you've been whining about how your OPEX is too high and these guys have been demonstrating, like what this needs to happen. You know, and you know our high volume manufacturing partner we are kind of in discussions, but it may very well be in Detroit. So not just made in the US, made in Detroit, I mean. You Right, I mean that's a rough, a lot of boxes there.
Pete:Yeah, Now that makes sense. So you know, getting the it's, it's, you know, especially as a startup, you've got to find that customer that's willing to work with you as a proof point or a case study, or whatever the term is.
Pete:And for those in the audience that don't know that haven't worked with telcos. It's a long road before that check clears Right. You've got the POCs and the field trials and all this stuff and then eventually hopefully they buy something. But it's you sort of have to have the intestinal fortitude and I guess the bank, the bank has to be set up right so that you can survive the telco engagements. That's right. That's a long time.
Joel:Yeah, I mean we, you know we. It was a huge break to go our way, kind of a Lisa, you know. Sign up as a customer and cut a check to a startup company.
Joel:You know that has. You know, not produced by, like that. No one who knows the telcospace can believe that actually happened. Right, yeah, yeah, but you know it did and I think it is a you know. Among other things, it is a measure of you know the seriousness of the money problem, but they have been watching this exponential data rise and seeing that you know that that's not a made-up problem right.
Pete:Yeah, and they're seeing it on a monthly basis. I'm sure they're being reminded of the problem and the problem getting worse.
Joel:So so so the other piece of scaling then Is, you know, kind of being patient with the other carriers around the world who are having the same problem, whether they realize it or not, right, right. So you kind of get, you know, be patient with them, you know, but they have an exponential cost pressure that is bearing down on them. That makes you more, if it more attractive, at a rate of 20% per year, yeah, yeah, that's not any.
Pete:Do you have any tools to sort of look at a telco and say, based on the number of subscribers and their infrastructure, we can estimate sort of their energy consumption and you can walk to them, walk into them and say, I know that you're probably spending this much on your energy and we can cut that in half. Or Can you size these telcos and say kind of this is there? Because I think one of the things that's missing, by the way, in this whole energy space and this is for AI as well, in data centers is there's a lack of telemetry and measurement of actual power consumption. Right, you know, like the old energy star remember the energy star sticker on your fridge you would say, yeah, this is five dollars a month or whatever.
Pete:There's no transparency today on how much energy is being used for you know 5g or AI or any of these compute things for for companies and and people, right, so if I went to, if I go to you know being co-pilot or whatever it's called these days, and I say you know, generate a cat poem and it said this is going to cost, you know, 12 trees or whatever. That's real transparency for me. And similarly, like I don't think there's a lot of telemetry and transparency, probably in the telco infrastructure, to really understand exactly how much the how many resources are required to make this stuff run. I don't know if that's a yeah, yeah so.
Joel:So that is true sometimes, and you know some carriers to even extend your point, you know, up until now have sort of relied on the honor system with energy building, like the bills, like that's how, that's how Unimportant was yeah, flat fee.
Joel:Beautiful thing about an exponential rise is that it comes up so quickly that even if you're not being precise, you know you get that sort of one or two significant digits and it's big. So you know. And then the other thing, that is because energy is so popular to calculate the carriers walk around saying Roughly what their bill is. So without naming the different carriers, you know, I will say that one prominent carrier in the US spends about five hundred million dollars a year on electricity. Wow, another prominent one, I think the number is between 1.5 and 1.8 billion. You know electricity, yeah, so it's come up on them fast. And then the other thing that we have is with our you know our initial customer, kind of in Finland. You know you can take the number of towers and scale roughly, okay, take from their data to kind of get so. So we, we know what, how painful it is. You know kind of the customer service. You know kind of finesse there is, you know. You know people don't react so well being told what their problem is. Right, you see what you're doing wrong. Yeah, exactly, so it's, it's some ways be. You know we have.
Joel:This is something that I had to learn kind of as an entrepreneur, because you have, you come in it with it, to it with all of the sort of analytical like that's your thing, right, physics right, and you know it does help you, you kind of solve problems. But what we lead with now is With care is, hey, we will do something that our competitors will never do for you. We will custom design a radio for your network and what's important to you. Now we happen to know that Whatever is important to them Can usually be improved by being smarter about energy, right, but they don't need to know that, they don't need to appreciate that up front. If they, if they do appreciate that, that's great, you know.
Joel:But you know many times that the where we're getting more traction because these guys are the carriers. No one feels sorry for the carriers, but they are Pushed around by the big OEMs, right, right, it's like you know, you have a network, we have radios, you know you've got two flavors, you know chocolate or vanilla, pick one exactly. Well, you know, I'll take chocolate. We're out of chocolate. You come in, you know, kind of, hey, we will design something for you. The second thing we come in with is you're a domestic supplier, you know. And then when we get, and then that that that's kind of the thing that we lead with.
Pete:Interesting. Yeah well, it sounds like, sounds like a great value proposition and I think you're trying to, like you said, navigate that of a small company operating in a very big space with very, very big customers. You know that's interesting dynamic. I think a lot of startups kind of see had that challenge too is like how do they yes, how do they scale? It's it's all about scale at the end of the day To turn into a real business. There's operational scale this channel sales, you know. Then there's support and maintenance and all that stuff that that assumes that you have customers, which is kind of what the first, first now job number one is get a customer or two.
Pete:Yeah, yeah yeah, it sounds like that's happening, so no, that's great.
Joel:As you see, and you raise a great point actually with the difference between sort of being a technology, you know, kind of company being a real company, right, it's just like with all of the stuff about you know the logistics, the maintenance, you know kind of the volume Manufacturing, right, what you find is that there are and this is kind of a blind spot for people who come from my background right, this is like with the heavy research you know kind of university type of thing we used focusing on the theoretically important problem, you know, and not really thinking so much about how you can't manufacture a billion of these and have it yield at 95%. It kind of doesn't count if global impact is what you're trying to do, right. So you know all the things that you mentioned there. You know that. You know, from someone of my background I would have called a little bit mundane maybe 10 years ago. Now that is that is central to, that's central to solving the whole problem, yeah, yeah.
Pete:No, it's interesting. It's like the. You know you're asking a company and a big company at that, a telco to take a dependency on you, and I was meeting with some Silicon folks down in the Bay area recently one of them happens to be more of a startup-y type thing, kind of looking for that first big customer. And you know the challenge is you walk in there and they're like who are you and why should I take a bet on you? Because, by the way, if I do bet on you and then you can't deliver, I'm stuck. And so it's thinking about how do you tell a story that has like some sort of a trust and integrity or something where they can believe that you kind of have your shit together and you can deliver after the contract signed?
Pete:Yeah, be around and be sustainable, that's a tough one. It's not an engineering problem, it's a business problem and logistics problem, and so that's a big part of it. I work with a lot of companies that they have definitely built a new, better mousetrap. There's no doubt it is a better mousetrap, but it's like well, how do you get that people aware of it? How do they buy it? How do you install it? How does it get supported? Who's selling it? How are they motivated? Like the whole supply chain.
Pete:Like a lot of folks struggle with that part. They come up with the mousetrap straight away, but then they struggle to sort of get escape velocity. I would call it.
Joel:Yeah, and I will speak only for myself, because everybody has a different look. But as someone who has invented a number of mousetraps, it takes some very painful lessons to learn that. Because what you think in the privacy of your mind, or what I thought in the private mind, if my mousetrap is good enough, somebody is going to save me from those business problems. Everything will line up, right. Yes, everything will line up. You know somebody will, and usually that salvation comes in the form of an acquisition, you know, by a company, right, but this is a different way, but that's a and so it. Actually, it can make you a little bit lazy if you are a mousetrap company Okay, we're focusing on our proof of concept and you kind of let these other problems go because you think if we can just get this across the finish line, people can see how brilliant it is. You know then they're, you know right, and so for me, that was, that was just. It was a shocking, you know painful lesson.
Joel:You know, at my last company we had I'll never forget, I think it was like the 2014 Mobile World Congress we had running at the same time, you know, kind of a handset transmitter, a Wi-Fi transmitter and a base station transmitter, the highest efficiency in the world by far, couldn't believe it. It's actually happening, you know. But you know, since we weren't building a whole radio or a whole handset, you know we couldn't, we couldn't force our way into the market, you know, via our you know kind of performance Right. So we had to kind of get the cooperation of the incumbents and we just wanted in the wilderness forever, it was, it was, it's, it's actually looking back, quite fortunate that we got an acquisition. It was a.
Joel:You know, at the end of the day there's $180 million of this. There's nothing to complain about with what didn't happen. But you know, with talking heads, you know the things that you just raised. You know me and my team, we are really focused on making sure that we don't get lazy in that way. You know, when the telcos say, how can we? You know what story do you tell? You know the story is. You know you actually have to have your shit together, like that has to. You have to be able to do that. Yes, exactly, deliver.
Pete:We had to be able to deliver. Once they say, yes, I'll buy it, and it's like okay, now what do we do?
Joel:Yeah, and the thing, the thing that that you know again, the thing that that you know is a big part of our opportunity, you know, is just knowing that. You know when our equipment does what we say it does, that that gets exponentially more valuable to them. And kind of in the background, you know, and so it starts to be, especially once you have a deployment, you know, say anywhere in the world, or multiple deployments, it becomes very tough for them to justify. You know, paying energy bills, you know that are one, half, two times what it is we're talking about wireless.
Pete:Yeah, then the train starts rolling. But no, that's been good. I think this conversation today has been helpful because I think folks, first of all, have a better understanding of what you're doing, which I think it's fascinating. It definitely plays into this energy efficiency, you know, theme that's going on and, like I said, there's a lot of that discussion in AI and semiconductors, but now also 5G. So I think you're one of the few companies really shining a light on it.
Pete:But also, I think you know, for a lot of folks that are in this kind of entrepreneurial phase or maybe they're sitting at home with their better mousetrap or they're part of a small company, you know it's you got to think about that A lot of the things that you're working through and have worked through a pretty universal companies in the tech space maybe not even in the tech space that are like I have this value proposition, it's good, but you know how do I actually execute on it and turn it into a real business?
Pete:And yeah, yeah, and I guess that's part of the, you know, going back to the original thing, like why being an entrepreneur that's the exciting part is like you get to sort of put this whole thing together and, you know, learn about it and hopefully have a good team, and then you know, actually feel like you have some real ownership and control of what you're doing, as opposed to you know being inside a big company is good, there's lots of resources, and then sometimes those resources are super helpful. Sometimes they are antibodies or impediments, depending on what's going on. So, but yeah, no, I really appreciate any closing thoughts for our listeners, any call to action. Should they just kind of go check out your website and all that good stuff.
Joel:Yeah, yeah, I mean you do check out the website and you know it's and you know just sort of say that it is something that could have increasingly come to value. I mean, you know, even on your kind of down days and the contributions you know what you just said about you know kind of kind of try to drive your own vision. I mean, that's a you know you're very fortunate if you're in a position to do that, you know, and so that's something that we're that I'm trying to. It'd be mindfully grateful. Yeah, awesome.
Pete:Sounds good. Well, thanks, joel. I really appreciate the time and enjoy the Boston area. I envy being there. But yeah, we'll talk soon. For sure Sounds good.
Joel:Sounds good, we have a great holiday for our talk to you. Yeah, thanks.
Pete:Thanks for joining us today on the Edge Celcior Show. Please subscribe and stay tuned for more and check us out online about how you can scale your Edge compute business.