Shownotes
Andrew Skafel
Bio
Andrew Skafel is a recognized leader in wireless and next-generation Wi-Fi, driving innovation as President and CEO of Edgewater Wireless. Under his leadership, the company has pioneered Wi-Fi Spectrum Slicing, revolutionizing high-density wireless performance. With over two decades in telecom and technology, Andrew has led product development, strategy, and key industry partnerships. His customer-focused vision ensures Edgewater’s patented solutions address real-world connectivity challenges. A sought-after expert on Wi-Fi innovation, Andrew continues to shape the future of wireless communications, positioning Edgewater Wireless as a global leader in scalable, high-performance networking solutions. Mr. Skafel holds an MBA from INSEEC (Paris), a graduate diploma from the McRae Institute of International Management (Vancouver) and a BA in Economics & Politics from the University of Western Ontario.
Intro
In this enlightening discourse, we engage with Andrew Skafel, the founder and CEO of Edgewater Wireless, who elucidates a transformative approach to Wi-Fi technology that addresses fundamental limitations within the current infrastructure. The salient point of our conversation revolves around Edgewater's innovative solution, which not only enhances the performance of existing Wi-Fi devices but also significantly reduces latency and congestion in both residential and enterprise environments. Through a strategic partnership with Cable Labs, Andrew shares how their focus shifted from high-density stadium applications to a broader market that includes homes and businesses, revealing the expansive potential of their technology. He emphasizes the importance of understanding market needs and the critical role of customer feedback in driving successful pivots within a startup. This episode serves as a masterclass in leveraging technological advancements to meet widespread demands, illustrating that often, the simplest questions yield the most profound innovations.
Conversation
Andrew Skafel, the founder and CEO of Edgewater Wireless, engages in a profound dialogue with Jothy Rosenberg regarding the persistent challenges associated with Wi-Fi technology. The discussion elucidates the inherent limitations of traditional Wi-Fi, which relies on a contention-based protocol that leads to congestion as more devices connect. Skafel articulates how Edgewater Wireless has pioneered a transformative solution that introduces a multi-lane highway concept for Wi-Fi, thereby enabling multiple concurrent channels from a single device. This innovation not only alleviates the common frustrations experienced by users, such as slow connections and video call disruptions, but also enhances overall network performance across both new and legacy devices.
A significant theme that emerges from the conversation is the necessity of understanding product-market fit. Initially targeting high-density stadium applications, Edgewater Wireless underwent a pivotal shift in focus, guided by insights from partnerships with industry bodies like Cable Labs. This collaboration unveiled the broader applicability of their technology across homes and enterprises, ultimately leading to a substantial market opportunity that is exponentially larger than their original target. Skafel emphasizes that successful entrepreneurship often hinges on the ability to pivot and adapt based on customer feedback and market realities, a lesson that resonates deeply within the ever-evolving landscape of technology startups.
The dialogue also touches upon the integration of artificial intelligence within their Wi-Fi solutions, which further enhances performance optimization in dense environments. By leveraging AI for proactive channel management, Edgewater Wireless positions itself as a leader in the Wi-Fi space, addressing not only the immediate technical challenges but also setting the stage for future innovations in connectivity. This episode serves as a comprehensive exploration of the intersection between technology, market strategy, and the relentless pursuit of improvement in user experience, offering invaluable insights for aspiring entrepreneurs and industry veterans alike.
Takeaways
- The importance of understanding product-market fit cannot be overstated; it is essential for success.
- Strategic partnerships, such as those with Cable Labs, can significantly enhance market visibility and understanding.
- Validation in deep tech necessitates extensive scale; small pilots often fail to demonstrate real-world applicability.
- To solve complex problems, one must pivot and adapt based on customer feedback and market demands.
- Edgewater Wireless transitioned from a narrow focus on stadiums to addressing widespread home and office Wi-Fi challenges.
- Leveraging AI for spectrum management in Wi-Fi systems can dramatically improve performance and user experience.
- Who Says You Can't Startup | Full Bundle | Incorrigible Entrepreneur - My new online course for startup founders called Who Says You Can't Startup!
- Home - EdgeWater Wireless
- Jothy's TEDx talk - On why those with disabilities tend to overachieve
- The Who Says I Can't Foundation - Jothy's non-profit that helps disabled kids get back into a sport they love to restore their self-esteem
- Our YouTube channel
- Designing Successful Startups — Jothy Rosenberg | Author | Speaker | Podcaster - Site with all podcasts
- Tech Startup Toolkit book
- Please leave us a review
Transcripts
Please meet today's guest, Andrew Scaefel.
Speaker B:And that pivot was customer driven.
Speaker B:We had the fortune of being aligned with one of the large industry bodies called Cable Labs, which is the global R D arm for the cable industry.
Speaker B:And through working with Cable Labs, actually we were given visibility into a large segment of the market.
Speaker B:Market.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Initially we were targeting, you know, high density stadium applications.
Speaker B:And Cable Labs helped us understand that those same problems that are.
Speaker B:That we're seeing in a stadium, which is a very small market.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Actually take place in enterprises and most importantly, in the home.
Speaker A:Welcome to designing successful startups.
Speaker A:I'm Jathy Rosenberg.
Speaker A:What if I told you there's a startup that's about to solve one of the most frustrating problems in your daily life?
Speaker A:And you probably don't even realize it's a problem.
Speaker A:Every time you're on a video call and it freezes Every time your smart home device is slow to a crawl, every time you walk into a coffee shop and your WI fi barely works.
Speaker A:That's the problem.
Speaker A:Today I'm talking with Andrew Scaefel, founder and CEO of Edgewater Wireless, who's built what might be the most important infrastructure technology you've never heard of.
Speaker A:They've cracked the code on WI fi's fundamental limitation.
Speaker A:And here's the kicker.
Speaker A:Their solution makes all WI fi devices faster, even the old ones in your house right now.
Speaker A:But this isn't just a technology story.
Speaker A:It's a masterclass on how to pivot when you discover your brilliant technology is solving the wrong problem.
Speaker A:How a partnership with Cable Labs opened up a market six times larger than they originally targeted.
Speaker A:And why.
Speaker A:Sometimes the biggest breakthroughs come from asking the simplest question.
Speaker A:Why can't WI fi work like a multi lane highway?
Speaker A:Andrew's about to share how they went from targeting stadiums to transforming every home and office on the planet.
Speaker A:Let's dive in.
Speaker A:Welcome to the show, Andrew.
Speaker A:It's great to have you on board.
Speaker B:Thank you for having me, Jothy.
Speaker A:Here's what I like to do to set context for everybody.
Speaker A:It's very simple.
Speaker A:I'd just like to ask you, where are you originally from and where do you live now?
Speaker B:I am from a place called London, Ontario in Canada, and I'm currently based in Ottawa, Ontai Canada.
Speaker A:Isn't.
Speaker A:Isn't London a sort of a suburb of Toronto?
Speaker B:It's about.
Speaker B:It's about two hours away from.
Speaker A:That's not a suburb.
Speaker A:Yeah, it's not a suburb.
Speaker B:Not a suburb.
Speaker A:All right, so first of all, let's just Also tell people, what is Edgewater Wireless, your current startup?
Speaker B:So at Edgewater Wireless we make WI FI better.
Speaker B:We're a Fabless semiconductor and IP licensing company with a really dramatically different approach to WI Fi.
Speaker A:And we'll get into a little bit more about that.
Speaker A:But let me also just explain because I am also running a company that is a Fabless semiconductor company.
Speaker A:So let me explain just quickly what you mean by IP licensing business.
Speaker A:A lot of people think IP means patents, but it also means more broadly intellectual property, which includes your entire product.
Speaker A:So there are usually big companies, like huge semiconductor companies that want to put a component that's made by somebody that specializes in that thing, whatever it is, into their chip.
Speaker A:And they do that by basically licensing your stuff or our stuff integrated in on their chip.
Speaker A:Some really long time later they're finally ready to ship.
Speaker A:This has been my problem and, and those of us that are in this business make money in the initial license, but not a lot of money, but some money.
Speaker A:But the big money comes from per chip royalties.
Speaker A:Is all that correct for you?
Speaker B:Yeah, that's right.
Speaker B:And this subtle nuance is that we, we are also developing our own semiconductor, right?
Speaker B:That's our semiconductors for use typically in WI fi devices like access points and things that demand higher capacity.
Speaker A:Cool.
Speaker A:So then, now that we know what it is, what is the problem with WI fi that you needed to create this company and solve this problem?
Speaker B:WiFi today generates about 70% of customer care calls at service providers like the Comcast, the charters of the world.
Speaker B:It is a significant, massive problem for their business.
Speaker B:And when we looked at the problem, we saw the fact that WI fi is a contention based protocol and it's a shared medium.
Speaker B:Which means every time you add a wifi device it has to contend for access to a single channel.
Speaker B:And each device you add, the slower it gets.
Speaker B:It's like driving down a single lane road right where you have traffic congestion and it's all start and stop.
Speaker B:That's latency.
Speaker B:So we looked at that problem, we said how do you solve a traffic congestion problem?
Speaker B:And we looked at it and we said, why not develop a multi lane highway for WI fi?
Speaker B:So we are the first to be able to offer multiple lanes or multiple concurrent channels from a single WI FI device which allows you to spread those devices over the multiple lanes and reduce traffic congestion.
Speaker A:So there was a company that came out a number of years ago and they were one of these people that put out a like early get in on our beta and you'll get a really Good deal.
Speaker A:And it was a company called Eero, which is now owned by Amazon.
Speaker A:And I jumped on board because I was having trouble.
Speaker A:When I tried to put a second access point, it cut of course my bandwidth in half.
Speaker A:And so Eero was a good solution at the time because it created a mesh in the house and that has helped us enormously.
Speaker A:But they didn't do what you're doing, which is going at a much more fundamental level of making it essentially higher bandwidth.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:Like Aero is a very cool product.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:And really pushed the bounds of improving coverage.
Speaker B:Now the, the key challenge that you really identified with Aero is, and all mesh providers is they're essentially sharing that same single channel.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:So they're, they may be increasing coverage, but they're adding devices to the network.
Speaker B:And so with our approach, which is what we call spectrum slicing, we can add physical capacity.
Speaker B:So for applications like Aero, for example, you can dedicate channels or lanes for those mesh nodes and actually improve the performance in your house, add the bandwidth and while lowering the latency because we're able to spread those POD devices over more channels without compromising performance.
Speaker B:So it's a, it's really an evolution of where WI fi is going to.
Speaker B:And we like to think of ourselves as standards leading.
Speaker B: The WiFi since: Speaker B:And there's simply not a whole lot more you can do with a single lane.
Speaker B:It really comes down to adding physical capacity, which is what we do with spectrum slicing.
Speaker A:Sure.
Speaker A:Seems a good partner for you at some point.
Speaker A:Might be Eero, because they're doing pretty well.
Speaker A:I think.
Speaker B:That's right.
Speaker B:They're doing awesome.
Speaker B:That's a very, very cool company and a great potential partner for us.
Speaker A:Okay, now what I read about and have heard from people who are more familiar with Edgewater Wireless than I am is that you've got a significant component of your solution that's AI based.
Speaker B:Yeah, that's really an exciting evolution for us.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Like our core value is really to add physical capacity.
Speaker B:And the challenge when you're doing a large scale deployment, let's say in a home or large enterprise or industrial IoT deployment, is how do you make it easy to really optimize performance with these multiple channels?
Speaker B:And we've added in our next generation of product, we added a layer of intelligence or AI on top of that, which allows for spectrum engineering.
Speaker B:So how do you optimize how those channels are used?
Speaker B:How do you mitigate congestion or manage spectrum allocation in real time?
Speaker B:Autonomously Right.
Speaker B:Without having to be the service provider going in and swiveling a chair and doing all this optimization with our patented AI algorithms, we manage the way that traffic flow works and really help.
Speaker B:And it helps level up the performance and usability of our system.
Speaker B:So it's a really exciting development.
Speaker B:WI Fi has just been so enormously successful.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:There's over 20 billion Wi Fi devices that have shipped to date.
Speaker B:And the biggest challenge with those devices is they're not all the latest and greatest chipsets.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:They're all big variants.
Speaker B:So with our spectrum slicing approach, it allows the performance gains to actually filter out to all devices, legacy and new.
Speaker B:So for a large semiconductor company, it really is a strong value add to their WI Fi silicon to be able to offer spectrum slicing.
Speaker A:And I can tell you from personal experience that because our lighthouse customer was NXP and our technology, our IP is hardware based cybersecurity, they really wanted to integrate that into their chip.
Speaker A:But what we discovered is that they automatically put some Wi Fi IP into their chip, but it was 10 years old.
Speaker A:And that's about six years.
Speaker A:Five.
Speaker A:Five or six years ago.
Speaker A:And I seriously doubt that they've changed it yet.
Speaker B:But that is really wild.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Here's a funny thing that happened too.
Speaker A:So it's not their ip.
Speaker A:They license it.
Speaker A:And I don't even know the name of the.
Speaker A:It was a French company that created it.
Speaker A:And while they were trying to integrate our stuff, they were putting that IP onto the same chip that we were going on.
Speaker A:And so they were starting to run a whole bunch of more comprehensive tests.
Speaker A:And they called us up and they said, we think there's a bug in your product.
Speaker A:And we were so new that we assumed there were quite a few bugs.
Speaker A:So.
Speaker A:So we jumped on it and we started to investigate and we sheepishly went back to them and said, no, it appears that there's actually two bugs in the WI FI stack you're using.
Speaker A:And then we showed them the data and they said, oh my God.
Speaker A:And they've been shipping it for 10 years.
Speaker A:And these were bugs that would enable somebody to easily take over the whole chip.
Speaker A:Wow.
Speaker A:Because it was a buffer, they could do a buffer overflow and inject their own code into the portion of their chip, which was just this wifi stuff.
Speaker A:The bad guy has ejected what however much code they want, millions of bytes of code, and then they start running that code and it takes over the whole chip.
Speaker A:And so they were like, oh my God, what do we do?
Speaker A:Because they can't patch that kind of thing out in the field.
Speaker A:It's just there.
Speaker A:And like I said, it had been shipping for 10 years.
Speaker A:It was in a lot of chips.
Speaker A:They typically ship about the numbers.
Speaker A:For these big semiconductor companies, a given part likes to ship 100 million units a year.
Speaker B:That's incredible.
Speaker A:Hi.
Speaker A:The podcast you are listening to is a companion to my recent book Tech Startup Toolkit how to Launch Strong and Exit Big.
Speaker A:This is the book I wish I'd had as I was founding and running eight startups over 35 years.
Speaker A:I tell the unvarnished truth about what went right and especially about what went wrong.
Speaker A:You could get it from all the usual booksellers.
Speaker A:I hope you like it.
Speaker A:It's a true labor of love.
Speaker A:Now back to the show.
Speaker A:One of the things that is also unique about your WI fi is that it is going to solve some of the messiness when WI fi is in a dense environment.
Speaker A:And I think we've all seen some signs of that when we're in a the middle of a city and there's just WI fi from everyone on the floors above you and below you and on the buildings next to you.
Speaker A:And it's just crazy.
Speaker A:So how do, what is it that your AI is going to do to help solve that problem?
Speaker B:It's interesting, right?
Speaker B:When we first started doing this, high density was a stadium and that's where the challenge really was.
Speaker B:But, but with that enormous and continual increase in the number of devices, high density now extends from stadiums to businesses to the home.
Speaker B:So it is a phenomenally large problem.
Speaker B:Now, traditional WI fi, when it is faced with dense environments is reactive.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:So when a collision occurs, WI fi is a very robust protocol, right.
Speaker B:So it will, you know, rebroadcast, it will do all of these things to make sure that your packets get through, no matter how congested it is.
Speaker B:It's where you get that latency and, and it's compounded when there's interference added.
Speaker B:Now all it can really do is back off and retransmit.
Speaker B:That's really the sort of the native ability now.
Speaker B:And often you get increased latency or your connection will drop.
Speaker B:Your video pixelates, all of these things.
Speaker B:Now with our AI subsystem, it's proactively based analysis of what's going on in the environment.
Speaker B:For example, we look at the entire band or a big swath of the spectrum and the AI engine can look at that and say, gosh, you know what, there's a lot of interference down in this one area.
Speaker B:So we're going to utilize channels that fall outside of that area or move our traffic to those channels within the spectrum slicing initiation.
Speaker B:So it enables the use of the data received, the coverage area and all of these inputs to deliver and boost the overall quality of service and really transform that user experience.
Speaker B:It's like your WI fi is recognizing a spike in video traffic, not just the environment, but also the usage.
Speaker B:And it reallocates the spectrum capacity to handle the load or to mitigate the interference or to really help minimize the messiness that's in a dense or challenging environment.
Speaker A:So I also got some information that you recently got some very prestigious award from the Canadian government.
Speaker B:Yeah, it's been a really exciting year so far.
Speaker B:The similar to the US and the CHIPS act, the Canadian government has come up with a similar program called Fabric.
Speaker B:And we were recently awarded a large government grant to help power the development of our silicon.
Speaker B:And this is a $223 million program, government program.
Speaker B:And the first initiations went out.
Speaker B:So we're really starting to ramp up our capability to deliver this silicon and it really helps us de risk some of our R and D efforts and accelerate the commercialization of our next generation of chips.
Speaker B:But it's cool because it's also a larger ecosystem play.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:So it's helping us build a more competitive national ecosystem around semiconductor because this is a very complex and challenging space to operate within.
Speaker A:No kidding.
Speaker A:What I was going to say is that most importantly about this award is that it's non dilutive.
Speaker B:That's it.
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker B:And you as a multi, multi company founder that minimizing dilution makes, makes all of your shareholders and stakeholders much, much more happy.
Speaker A:Much happier.
Speaker A:Yes.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:You are part of the Silicon Catalyst incubator program, as was I.
Speaker A:What has it, what has it done for you?
Speaker B:Oh, it's, it's interesting.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Being able to, it's done a number of things.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Being able to tap an ecosystem of partners and advisors, I think has been a real, real positive outcome for us.
Speaker B:The Advisor Network, as you're aware, is some of the top semiconductor people in the world with very deep subject matter expertise.
Speaker B:So for us, being able to reach out to folks and being engaged with folks that have done similar things or have such a deep bench strength of industry expertise is helping us on the execution from refining product market fit and preparing for mass manufacturing.
Speaker B:And also many of the sort of the intangible things in building a semiconductor company.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Like finding people to do specific, specific work has been a challenge in the space.
Speaker B:And having Silicon Catalyst behind us really helps and then the in kind partner ecosystem has been, been extremely helpful.
Speaker B:Since joining Silicon Catalyst we've, we've aligned ourselves with, with army which was a very exciting development just to be able to crack into that ecosystem, very powerful ecosystem.
Speaker B:And we're working with a number of other partners at this time as well, which we'll be talking about in the upcoming, upcoming weeks.
Speaker A:And so I remember we got just tremendous discount on Synopsys tools for example that are otherwise so expensive.
Speaker B:It's incredible.
Speaker B:And I think for us being able to have such a cost effective relationship with somebody like a Synopsys is incredible or ARM being part of their flexible access program, we would not have been able to access such valuable world renowned IP without being part of that program.
Speaker B:So it's been really, really helpful.
Speaker B:And it's.
Speaker B:A couple of, a couple months ago we were at the portfolio company Update in Silicon Valley where we got to give our initial presentation and gosh, it was a room full of people who actually understand semiconductor products and invest in semiconductor products.
Speaker B:And the Q and A in that event was like nothing that we've seen before.
Speaker B:Just very detailed in depth challenging questions, which was amazing.
Speaker A:So speaking of the incubation and forming the company and product market fit and all the things you've had to do with, what would you say was the largest mistake that you, or I shouldn't say mistake, just the thing that threw you for a loop the most, I'm.
Speaker B:Happy to call them mistakes and challenges and key learnings along the way.
Speaker B:But for us, you know, the biggest mistake in the early stages of the company was not really understanding our, our value proposition and our, our product market fit.
Speaker B:So when we first launched the company had a very broad based approach and didn't really understand the value of what spectrum slicing delivers.
Speaker B:And that kind of led to some struggles and a pivot.
Speaker B:Actually once we've peeled back the layers of the onion and really understood the problem that we're solving and that pivot was customer driven.
Speaker B:So we had the fortune of being aligned with one of the large industry bodies called Cable Labs, which is the global R and D ARM for the cable industry.
Speaker B:And through working with Cable Labs we were given visibility into a large segment of the market.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Initially we were targeting high density stadium applications and Cable Labs helped us understand that those same problems that we're seeing in a stadium, which is a very small market, right, very actually take place in enterprises and most importantly in the home.
Speaker B:And that transformation of understanding the problem and that market fit was Enormous.
Speaker B:And we were able to really build on that understanding of the residential problem through our work with Cable Labs to build that through to an engagement with one of the largest service providers in the world with Liberty Global, where we were able to take it to the next level, which was one of the largest proof of concepts that I've been involved with in my career.
Speaker B:We looked at six million devices and three quarters of a million homes and analyzed the WI Fi performance, this massive network.
Speaker B:And that really helped us really refine the value proposition.
Speaker B:And that led to a pilot with our Beta Silicon.
Speaker B:So it's been an evolution of learning from the fundamental challenge at the beginning.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Which was understanding product market fit.
Speaker A:I'm very fond of saying that there's no startup that's ever succeeded who didn't prove product market fit.
Speaker B:That's right.
Speaker B:That's right.
Speaker A:It's.
Speaker B:And it's.
Speaker B:You can have a gee whiz technology and everything, but you've really got to understand where that fits and what the market is.
Speaker A:It seems to me that this is.
Speaker A:When the world discovers this, that this is going to be something for which there's a very high demand.
Speaker A:Meaning I can't imagine that you will even be allowed to get to an IPO that you will be acquired before that happens.
Speaker B:It's interesting.
Speaker B:We are actually a publicly listed company in Canada.
Speaker B:We trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange, Venture Exchange as YFI or WI fi.
Speaker B:And the venture exchange in Canada is like public venture capital.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:So we are very much a small market cap player.
Speaker A:Nothing like that in the US though, right?
Speaker B:No, no.
Speaker B:Really?
Speaker B:I think so.
Speaker B:It's a pretty uniquely Canadian thing and I think potentially be taken.
Speaker B:Being taken out along the way is definitely a risk of our business opportunity.
Speaker B:It is an enormous problem that we're solving and it's an enormous market opportunity.
Speaker A:It puts you in a great position.
Speaker A:It's just.
Speaker A:That's incredible.
Speaker A:Andrew, I want to finish up with one very different question.
Speaker A:We both know that anyone who's doing what you're doing, what I do, has to have a lot of grit.
Speaker A:And I would like to know where your grit comes from.
Speaker A:Oh, wow.
Speaker B:That's a good.
Speaker B:That's a good question.
Speaker B:That's a good question.
Speaker B:You know, it's really hard to say where it comes from.
Speaker B:I, I'm.
Speaker B:If I had to identify a personal flaw, it would be.
Speaker B:I don't like to lose and I'm mildly competitive.
Speaker B:I don't know if that's a, if that's such a, such good grit.
Speaker B:But that's.
Speaker B:And I don't know about you, but what, what we do is actually, it's really fun, right?
Speaker B:You have an opportunity to have an outsized impact on a global industry and you get to meet some really neat people along the way.
Speaker A:I'm going to be watching this.
Speaker A:This is going to be very interesting to watch.
Speaker A:Maybe I'll get more active as a, as an advisor for the Silicon Catalyst Group.
Speaker A:I've, I haven't really spent a whole lot of time doing that because I haven't had a whole lot of time to do it.
Speaker B:That would be great.
Speaker B:Be great to connect again.
Speaker B:This has been excellent.
Speaker A:Thank you for taking the time and I think a lot of people will learn a lot from this discussion we just had.
Speaker B:Excellent.
Speaker B:Thanks for having me.
Speaker A:And here are your three toolkit takeaways.
Speaker A:Takeaway number one Product Market Fit Trumps Cool Technology Andrew's biggest lesson Having amazing technology means nothing if you don't understand the real problem you're solving.
Speaker A:Edgewater started targeting stadiums, a tiny market, until Cable Labs showed them the same problem existed in every home and office.
Speaker A:Don't fall in love with your first market assumption.
Speaker A:Let customers guide you to where the real pain lives.
Speaker A:Takeaway number two strategic partnerships can 10x your market understanding.
Speaker A:Notice how Cable Labs didn't just validate their technology, they completely transformed their business model.
Speaker A:The right industry partner can give you visibility into problems in markets you never knew existed.
Speaker A:Look for organizations that have a bird's eye view of your industry's biggest challenges.
Speaker A:Takeaway number three in Deep Tech validation means scale.
Speaker A:Andrew didn't just get a few pilot customers.
Speaker A:They analyzed 6 million devices across 750,000 homes.
Speaker A:In infrastructure and deep tech, you need massive scale validation to prove your solution works in the real world.
Speaker A:Small pilots aren't enough when you're trying to transform fundamental technology that billions of people rely on.
Speaker A:That's our show with Andrew.
Speaker A:The show notes contain useful resources and links.
Speaker A:Please follow and rate us@podchaser.com designingsuccessful startups.
Speaker A:Also, please share and like us on your social media channels.
Speaker A:This is Joffy Rosenberg saying TTFN Tata for now.
