When adoption means nobody knows your product exists | Mario Di Dio

Mario Di Dio (0:00)

Now, we are switching the model a little bit like AWS did for Cloud, from a model where the carrier owns everything, very CapEx intensive, again, analogy with AWS, Enterprise having their own server room, to a model where now, sure, you still have some things maybe in-house, but also you start leveraging multiple network to serve your user, a little more of an OPEX model similarly to the Cloud for Enterprise.

Brad (0:30)

Welcome back to another episode of Builders. As always, this show is brought to you by frontlines.io, Silicon Valley's leading B2B podcast production studio. If you're bringing technology to market and want to learn from your peers, we have a library of more than 1200 interviews with venture-backed founders and marketers where they talk all things go to market. Of course, if you want to launch your own podcast, we offer podcasts as a service to more than 80 tech startups. The idea there is very simple. You show up and host and we do everything else. Now, with all that said, let's jump into today's episode.

Mario, welcome to the show.

Mario Di Dio (1:05)

Hey, Brad. Thank you for having us. It's exciting.

Brad (1:07)

Yeah, looking forward to this. So you're a telco guy. How do you become a telco guy? Growing up or you're just thinking about telco, how did that happen?

Mario Di Dio (1:14)

It's actually interesting because I started from computer science, actually. When I was young, I was extremely obsessed with computer systems. And so my parents scrapped enough money to get me a very old 386 from a plumber that was using it for inventory management. And I remember the excitement of running it. And the first thing that I did, because I didn't know, and back then I was like 11, I was like, what should I do? And there was, oh, we should do a database because there's this inventory management system that this plumber was using. And I created a database of our vaccination records as a family.

Everybody remembers. So my first software product was a vaccination records for our family, because I mean, why not? But then growing up, I stumbled across radios and telecommunications, and I landed in this weird space where you could apply computer science to telecommunications. And that's what brought me all the way to a PhD in telecommunication engineering, which was about computer science applied. There is a specific, there is called software defined radio for the ones that might have that type of knowledge. But that's how I got into Telco.

And I never left since then. I always make the joke that we get paid for invisible things because nobody sees radio waves, and there's this magical thing, but it's getting so much impact in people's lives. That's how we communicate to them. We don't even realize how much, probably we do now, but it's everywhere. It's all around us. That's how media is done, communication and information. That's how wars are won or lost. It's incredible, the impact of Telco in all aspects of our lives. So it's fascinating.

Brad (2:47)

And for those of us not in this industry, which would probably be everyone, myself included, or 99% of people listening in, is there anything specific that you tell people who aren't in this industry, where they're like, wow, that is crazy?

Mario Di Dio (2:58)

Well, back when I was working at CableLabs, which prior to helium, it was an innovation center for the cable industry, one of the stats that was touching people is that some of the technologies that we were developing were used on a daily basis from 500 million people a day. One of the crazy aspects is that, especially when you work in standardization things for telco and radio waves, the impact is in the order of billions of people. For me, it was always crazy to think of much the impact of a few group of people in a room, like a standardization group is 30 people at max, and yet you have this gigantic impact. The other part is the invisibility of this, the fact that this is probably one of the fewest industries where the more successful is the technology that you produce, the less visible it is for the end customer, to a fault. To the point that it actually becomes hard to monetize at times, because it becomes so much embedded and so much invisible.

If you run a SaaS system or an app, sure, some of them can scale if you're Facebook. But in general, you're looking at millions and you're very happy when you have like 5 million downloads in your app or 10 million downloads. When you work with radios and telco and you're in that type of standardization, you impact the life of billions of people. It's fascinating.