5G Open Innovation Lab, backed by corporate giants, reveals 16 startups in second cohort

The 5G Open Innovation Lab (5G OI Lab), a startup program funded by T-Mobile, Intel, and NASA, today revealed its second cohort of companies.

The Bellevue, Wash.-based lab debuted in early May and wrapped up its first 12-week program in July. It aims to help entrepreneurs take advantage of 5G technology and build connections with a variety of partners from the public and private sphere.

Unlike many accelerators and incubators, the lab does not take equity stakes in the startups. But the sponsoring companies get early access for potential venture investments and are part of the cohort selection process. They also get a chance to work with early-stage startups that could end up being the next billion-dollar tech giant.

The lab is also a founding member of a Washington state “Innovation Partner Zone,” an alliance developed by the Department of Commerce to help spur collaboration between institutions, government organizations and companies. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratories, Snohomish County, Washington State University (WSU), the University of Washington, T-Mobile, and the City of Bellevue are part of the “5G Open Innovation Zone,” in addition to the lab.

5G is the next generation of wireless service that is expected to pave the way for smarter cities, faster downloads, self-driving cars, and countless other innovations that are hard to predict, just as tech stalwarts such as Uber and Snapchat couldn’t be anticipated until 4G and LTE made their business models possible.

Here are the 16 new companies, with descriptions from the lab:

Bluebox Labs: Bluebox uses Co-pilot to offer an affordable software ecosystem for any car, providing security, convenience, and savings to the user.FreedomFi: FreedomFi uses commodity hardware, open source software and CBRS shared spectrum to build cost efficient private LTE networks and future 5G IoT deployments.GenXComm: GenXComm has developed an advanced technology for 5G deployment which can operate in a variety of bands, including the unlicensed CBRS Band optimizing spectrum usage by allowing communication to transmit and receive simultaneously – on the same frequency.Innov8.ag: Innov8.ag combines on-farm and off-farm data with machine learning to inform grower decisions and maximize resource efficiency.Kubermatic Gmbh: Kubermatic’s platform automates the operations of Kubernetes clusters across multi-cloud, on-premises, and edge environments with a single management UI, addressing the operational challenge of running Kubernetes at scale.Latent AI: Latent AI’s modular software solution automates the resource-intensive tasks of training AI models for constrained devices anywhere on the edge continuum.Mangata Networks: Mangata Networks provides scalable global coverage, with satellite and terrestrial solutions for high capacity and affordable backhaul.MATRIX Labs: MATRIX Labs offers affordable FPGA-driven development boards with sensors, mics, and wireless communication protocols to facilitate IoT app creation.Megh Computing: Megh Computing provides a Real-Time Streaming Analytics Platform with AI+ acceleration using FPGAs for Edge-to-Cloud deployments.mimik Technology, Inc.: mimik provides a hybrid edgeCloud platform to enable any computing device with server capability, increasing data privacy and development speed while lowering the latency and cost of cloud hosting.MixComm: MixComm is the “Antenna to AlgorithmTM” company solving the challenges constraining 5G mmWave performance by extending the link range, reducing power consumption, and reducing system costs with their RFSOI Front End ICs and modules.Moeco IoT: Moeco combines a web platform with low-cost sensors to provide an end-to-end solution for data and sensor management as well as insight generation.Nodle: Nodle is a decentralized wireless network of millions of smartphones and Bluetooth devices connecting people and things privately and securely.PerVices: PerVices delivers a flexible, multi-channel transmit and receive solution using their high-performance software defined radio (SDR) platforms.QuayChain: QuayChain builds digital infrastructure through private LTE/5G for the Supply Chain, creating Smart Industrial Hubs to harvest & democratize data through IoT and AI-driven solutions in large multi-modal locations.Taubyte – Taubyte is The Smart Computing Platform that enables scaling software to the global infrastructure catalyzed by 5G and IoT; being fully automated (i.e. NoOps), it eliminates software development, deployment, and routing complexity at the Edge, allowing (I)IoT developers to focus on product features, while reducing costs and time to market.

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Pandemic threatens dominance of ‘superstar’ tech cities, creating new uncertainty for innovation hubs

Downtown Seattle and Mount Rainier as viewed from the top observation deck of the Space Needle. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser)

The seemingly unstoppable trend of tech companies and talent concentrating in a few cities hit a brick wall in March. As the first-known U.S. cases of the coronavirus emerged in Seattle and the San Francisco Bay Area, tech companies pioneered a nationwide shift to remote work.

Six months into the pandemic, some of those companies will never go back to the office in full force.

Meanwhile, the cities where tech has driven population spikes and surging home prices are confronting sudden budget shortfalls and scrambling to adjust. Seattle and San Francisco — home to the largest and most valuable tech companies in the country — are considering new business and wealth taxes to make up for the lost revenue.

City officials are charging the tech industry with funding recovery efforts, while business advocates sound familiar alarm bells about jobs leaving town.

It’s an old story with a new twist: a global experiment in the benefits and shortfalls of remote work. Could the pandemic really decentralize tech opportunity away from just a few cities? If so, what does it mean for the future of the tech industry in America? City officials and urban experts are watching the trend closely, but they’re divided over the implications.

In addition to infecting nearly 4 million people and killing at least 145,000 people in the US alone, the coronavirus has blown a major hole in the budgets of cities across the country. In Seattle, the shortfall is estimated to be around $400 million this year. San Francisco is scrambling to plug a $1.7 billion budget deficit over the next two years.

Both cities are considering taxes that target big business and wealthy executives to fill their gaps.

The Seattle City Council passed legislation earlier this month that taxes the top salaries at the highest paying companies in the city to fund coronavirus relief programs right away and affordable housing down the line.

Amazon has been a recurring focus of Seattle’s tax debate. (GeekWire Photo / Monica Nickelsburg)

In San Francisco, voters will be asked to decide on a number of new taxes this November that affect the tech industry, including a CEO tax on executives earning at least 100 times the median income of their average worker. Another proposal would tax stock-based compensation. Changes to the city’s payroll and gross receipts taxes are also under consideration.

The business communities in both tech hubs warn the taxes will push out jobs and hurt companies already struggling to weather the economic storm brought on by the pandemic.

Seattle Metro Chamber of Commerce vice president Mark McIntyre said the payroll tax will “stunt economic recovery, push high-paying jobs out of the city, further toxify the relationship between city government” in a statement.

Leila Kirske — who was speaking in her capacity as an Alliance for Pioneer Square Board member, and works as CFO of 98point6 — warned that “so many of the jobs lost will not come back.”

“Taxing those that remain will not make this community healthy again,” she said in a statement accompanying McIntyre’s, part of a round-up circulated by Seattle’s “No Tax on Jobs” campaign.

Jennifer Stojkovic, executive director of the tech advocacy group sf.citi, was more blunt in her prediction.

Sf.citi executive director Jennifer Stojkovic. (Sf.citi Photo)

“Tech’s going to leave,” she said in an interview with GeekWire. “There’s no way around it. We’re in this unprecedented time where companies are having huge downturns, and they are being hit with new taxes, and they don’t know if they are going to be able to afford this tax burden. In addition to the downturn that they are facing, and these layoffs, and thousands of jobs that have been lost, they have all their employees who have been working remotely since March, and they’re doing it.”

Though the pandemic adds a level of uncertainty that feels unprecedented, this isn’t the first time the business community has threatened lost jobs amid a tax battle — and the research paints a more complicated picture than the rhetoric.

Tech industry concentration in just a few cities ultimately comes down to talent. The U.S. has a shortage of engineers, data analysts, and other knowledge workers needed to power the technology industry. Those workers tend to gravitate toward places like Seattle or San Francisco, West Coast cities with plenty of amenities and like-minded people. Companies tend to cluster around those talent bases and value the knowledge exchange that occurs when workers bounce between startups and large tech firms.

The pandemic does not appear to be significantly changing that underlying trend — at least not yet.

Zillow compared web traffic to for-sale listings in urban, suburban, and rural areas in April 2019 and April 2020 and saw no significant change.

“The data do not provide any early evidence for an overall shift in search behavior away from urban cores,” Zillow said in its report.

Of course, that was early on in the pandemic, before some companies announced long-term plans to keep workers remote.

A survey by Blind of 4,400 Bay Area tech workers found about two-thirds would consider moving if they had the option to work remotely, Business Insider reports. But only 18% said they would consider moving out of California.

Some experts predict a slight deconcentration of tech within the municipal boundaries of cities like San Francisco and Seattle but don’t expect those jobs to travel far from the tech hubs where they were formed.  Companies might shift to towns surrounding those metros, like Bellevue, Wash., where they can still tap the talent pool that gravitates to premier cities. In San Francisco’s case, Stojkovic expects some tech companies and workers to move to the Seattle area, which offers many similar amenities but a relatively lower cost of living.

Richard Florida speaking at the 2018 Cascadia Innovation Cooridor Conference in Vancouver, B.C. (Cascadia Innovation Corridor Photo / Matt Borck)

Richard Florida, a distinguished urbanist and professor at the University of Toronto, told GeekWire that he does not expect U.S. tech hubs to decentralize in any significant way.

“San Francisco and Seattle will be just fine,” he said. “I do not see a massive relocation of large corporations or startups anywhere outside of the handful of superstar metros that have dominated this for the better part of two decades. I think that remote work is a different story. I think more workers in the tech community and elsewhere will work remotely, not all, but I think more will. My bigger point is, if San Francisco, New York, and Seattle went away you might as well just write off America’s high tech innovation capacity.”

The pandemic is the latest in a long list of catastrophes that have supposedly foretold the death of cities. For centuries, crises have led to grim forecasts about the end of cities and so far, no calamity has been more powerful than the trend of urbanization. Cities have weathered pandemics, hurricanes, bombings, recessions, and depressions before and rebounded each time.

 If San Francisco, New York, and Seattle went away you might as well just write off America’s high tech innovation capacity.

But there is one factor that makes our current moment different: remote work. Tech leaders are realizing that many jobs can be done just as efficiently from home, which could allow them to pay lower salaries in less expensive cities. A University of Chicago report published in June estimates 37% of U.S. jobs can be done entirely remotely.

Microsoft and Amazon were among the first to shift their tech workers remote when coronavirus cases began emerging in the Seattle area. Other tech companies up and down the West Coast quickly followed suit. In the months that followed, several announced new, permanent work from home policies.

Twitter and Square will allow employees to work from home indefinitely, even after the pandemic subsides. Facebook expects about 50% of its workforce to be remote in the next 5-10 years. Other companies are giving up their physical offices altogether.

“We’re not in a boom or bust binary anymore,” said Stojkovic of Silicon Valley’s tendency to pendulum swing. “There’s a third option and that’s pivoting to remote work. That’s the X-factor that we have at play and it will change everything. It will change what the path to recovery looks like because some companies will never go back.”

Stojkovic mentioned rumors that Uber, a member company of sf.citi, could relocate its headquarters to Dallas amid the tax battle in San Francisco. But the difficulty that states like Texas, have had containing the coronavirus could make tech workers less likely to relocate, according to Florida.

“Who in their right mind would move a company to Texas?” he said. “Texas has shown that it is incapable of governing itself. Great, maybe if Elon Musk wants to put a battery factory there, but the red states have shown that they’re incapable of providing a stable and healthy environment for people. Good luck attracting people to Texas.”

Instead, he predicts companies will set up smaller, premium headquarters in major tech hubs with remote workers distributed in nearby regions. These “high-end boutique” headquarters will continue to be in superstars cities, Florida said. “The headquarters is going to be like a brand enhancement.”

But even if America’s tech hubs remain relatively concentrated, they are not immune to global political and economic forces that are evolving rapidly. An increasingly burdensome U.S. immigration system and the nation’s difficulty containing the coronavirus could push entrepreneurs and engineers who would have moved to American tech hubs to consider cities in other countries, according to Florida.

“The real fear,” he said, “is that this climate makes people not come to U.S. cities at all.”

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Startup founders at new 5G Open Innovation Lab explain how they’ve adjusted to the COVID-19 crisis

It’s certainly been a unique inaugural cohort for the 5G Open Innovation Lab (5G OI Lab), a new startup program funded by T-Mobile, Intel, and NASA. But participating entrepreneurs are making the most of their time, particularly as the demand for some 5G-enabled technologies accelerates amid the COVID-19 crisis.

The Bellevue, Wash.-based lab debuted in early May and will wrapped up its first program — held virtually due to the pandemic — this week.

The 14 companies are working in tandem with a variety of partners from the public and private spheres, with the goal of growing their business in the midst of an economic and health crisis.

We caught up with six of the startups to learn more about how they’ve adjusted over the past several months and how they are using 5G to their advantage. They also provided advice to other entrepreneurs. The lab is accepting applications for its fall and spring 2021 cohorts.

Taqtile founders Dirck Schou, CEO, and John Tomizuka, CTO.

Founders: Dirck Schou, CEO, and John Tomizuka, CTO.

Headquarters: Seattle, Wash.

What does your company do? Taqtile builds enterprise AR software that makes everyone an expert by arming frontline workers with an intuitive tool to easily capture knowledge, perform complex tasks, and collaborate with remote experts in previously impossible ways.

What makes you different from the competition? What’s your secret sauce? Usability. Our Manifest platform is the most complete, end-to-end AR work-instruction platform for enterprises on the market. It’s designed to be effortless for experts to capture and author their knowledge, and for frontline users to accurately, efficiently, and safely put that knowledge to use in the field.

How has your business been affected by COVID-19 and how are you adapting? While COVID-19 has delayed several companies from deploying enterprise solutions, we’ve seen significant new interest in Manifest by demonstrating how feasible and beneficial remote work processes and distance-enabling technologies can be.

How are you using 5G technology? How does it make a difference for your company? Our Manifest AR platform works amazingly well on today’s commonly used networks, and it will be even more powerful on 5G. Most noticeably, the edge-computing design of 5G is going to dramatically improve throughput, resolve latency issues, and increase security for enterprise customers.

What’s one piece of advice you’d give other entrepreneurs who are just starting out? Prepare for a marathon, not a sprint. Establish your cheering section of believers and cultivate your connectors because you never know where you’ll encounter that one connection that is going to change your business’ trajectory. And refine your ability to write and articulate what makes you unique. Your customers, employees, and investors buy the story, not the technology.

Numurus founders Jason Seawall, CEO, and Ian McKissick, COO.

Founders: Jason Seawall, CEO, and Ian McKissick, COO.

Headquarters: Seattle, Wash.

What does your company do? Numurus offers B2B connectivity solutions between edge devices and cloud services focused on industrial and defense applications. Numurus’ flagship product NEPI is a smart IoT subscription platform that combines a secure IoT backbone, edge-device management, and cloud-portal management, with integrated AI services. With NEPI, product developers can rapidly transform their sensors and robotic technologies into smart IoT enabled solutions making them both more capable and more valuable to the end customer.

What makes you different from the competition? What’s your secret sauce? NEPI provides device manufacturers with a turnkey, affordable solution to meet the growing demands for Industry 4.0 capabilities. Instead of expensive and time-consuming in-house development, NEPI delivers the smart link that can bring an IoT application to the market in a competitive time frame. For a sensor or robot company, NEPI is the secret sauce that gets its commercial application to market and more profitable!

How has your business been affected by COVID-19 and how are you adapting? Today’s current situation related to COVID-19 has further motivated many asset operators to increase the adoption of smart device deployments that can reduce on-site personnel and ensure operational continuity. NEPI is working with companies to develop smart IoT applications that can support remote device management, remote facility maintenance, and inspection.

How are you using 5G technology? How does it make a difference for your company? Numurus’ NEPI platform provides integrated communications gateways for our IoT customers. Adding the 5G support, with its high bandwidth and low-latency characteristics, opens up new NEPI use-cases related to augmented reality, robotic teleoperations, and distributed artificial intelligence.

What’s one piece of advice you’d give other entrepreneurs who are just starting out? First, clearly define what your company does, not the underlying technology, and use that statement consistently, both internally for road-mapping and externally with potential customers. Second, build an MVP product and start bringing in revenue as fast as possible. Third, don’t give up!

Kristopher Francisco, Founder/CEO of Evolute.

Founders: Kristopher Francisco, CEO.

Headquarters: San Francisco, Calif.

What does your company do? Evolute enables Fortune 500 IT Managers to run software at the edge without a human operator. Unlike VMware, we can transform software to its most modular form, scale it up and down as a service, and manage without human intervention.

What makes you different from the competition? What’s your secret sauce? Evolute has Infrastructure AI, which allows us to seamlessly understand and transform software into its most modular and transportable form. With this deep level of insight, unlike other competitors, we can manage and operate the software at the edge without a human operator.

For companies in the energy industry, the cost of IT interruption or data loss to drilling can be up to $25K/hour. With an average of 70 deployments, for flagship edge teams, we’re saving over $1.75M/hour in no downtime computing. This ability to remove the human operator increases the value of the IT function and translates to $100M of business impact in the first year, for IoT and energy providers, for example, at the edge.

How has your business been affected by COVID-19 and how are you adapting? As a stealth mode startup, we anticipated that our customer base could dissipate. It turns out that digital transformation is on the rise during COVID-19. With the limited ability to access physical systems and data centers, companies need more remote operations technologies, such as our Edge Data Management Interface (EDMI) and the ability to achieve more in their enterprise clouds using our software.

We, like others, are seeing an approximately 75% uptick in customer demand. As one of our partners stated, “We used to take three years to do three weeks of digital transformation activity. Now we see three years of digital transformation happen in three weeks.” Companies must accelerate to more scalable, hands-off, new technologies quickly during this time.

How are you using 5G technology? How does it make a difference for your company? We are leveraging 5G in multiple ways. Evolute’s Edge Platform has two core components, our Intelligent Infrastructure software, and our EDMI. For our Intelligent Infrastructure Platform, we can use 5G network connectivity, down to a small x86 cluster, akin to the computer equipment used for telecommunication provider’s radio towers. Whether these small footprint, high-performance systems are being used on an oil rig or a shipping vessel, at all areas where power and space are a commodity we can bring an autonomous system to handle the critical software and computing infrastructure needed at the edge.

For Evolute’s EDMI, we can use all devices (phones, laptops, servers, network devices) to provide increased performance and reliability. Through EDMI, we can deliver software and data 20X faster to the edge. 5G is a critical component that gives us the speed and the increase in communications reliability to achieve that.

What’s one piece of advice you’d give other entrepreneurs who are just starting out?  I have a formula for innovation that I have presented as the “net present value” of software code.

First, I recommend new entrepreneurs to pick a dream bigger than what seems possible. I challenge you to create a technology that stands out from the crowd, taking vision and execution.

Second, work backward on the set of capabilities which would have to come together to make it a reality. Prototype and validate functionality, preferably with a potential customer. The only thing that matters first is the software’s validation.

From there, your goal is only to get five (B2B) or 500 people (B2C) saying they are game. Everything is just pushing numbers and business models after that (i.e., scaling it).

Here’s your rubric: If it takes you three months to build, you should be able to return 10X value in 12 months. If it requires 12 months to build it out, you had better return 100X the value within three years. Again, everything is just numbers and business models after that.

Adam Greenberg, CEO of IUNU.

Founders: Adam Greenberg, CEO.

Headquarters: Seattle, Wash.

What does your company do?  iUNU provides an AI & machine vision platform called LUNA to help growers make data- driven decisions, optimize their yield, and perfect shipment dates.

What makes you different from the competition? What’s your secret sauce? Our system gives growers the tools for comprehensive remote management by allowing them to see exactly what’s going on in their greenhouses at all times of the day and night, via a laptop or our phone app. No one else can offer comprehensive coverage of an entire farm, monitoring and optimizing every plant remotely. As a core team value, we are pushing to ensure that everyone has an equal opportunity for local, sustainable, and nutritious produce.

How has your business been affected by COVID-19 and how are you adapting? While we miss the culture that comes from working next to each other, we’re doing the same as our customers are doing — doing more with less. We’re working remotely and our business has increased as greenhouses realize the value iUNU offers during a time when even one employee testing positive can shut down an entire production line.

How are you using 5G technology? How does it make a difference for your company? The ability to move voluminous amounts of data across multiple platforms means our customers can access more information over a shorter period of time. This frees them up to spend more of their day solving their problems instead of analyzing their problems. With 5G technology, we’re now able to build out several new features that provide multiple benefits to our customers without the overhead of installing a WiFi network.

What’s one piece of advice you’d give other entrepreneurs who are just starting out? Keep in mind that in order to succeed you have to fail, no one gets it right the first time. We celebrate failure at every team meeting so we can all learn from individual mistakes. Always treat your employees like your most valuable resource, because without them, you can’t scale.

Mutable co-founders Vache Asatryan, co-Founder & CPO; Antonio “Pelle” Pellegrino, co-Founder & CEO; Nathalie Zadoks (Edef), co-Founder & CTO.

Founders: Vache Asatryan, co-founder & CPO; Antonio “Pelle” Pellegrino, co-founder & CEO; Nathalie Zadoks (Edef), co-founder & CTO.

Headquarters: New York City, NY, but engineering and product development is done primarily in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and Yerevan, Armenia.

What does your company do? Mutable is an edge computing startup building a “Public Edge Cloud” that delivers faster, cheaper, greener, and more secure internet experiences. While traditional cloud computing requires data to be sent to massive data centers hundreds of KMs away for processing, deploying a cloud “on the edge” (in other words: as geographically close to the end-user as possible) makes it possible to process data much faster and more securely. This opens up possibilities for telemedicine, autonomous vehicles, and better-networked devices.

Mutable’s “Public Edge Cloud” closely resembles the Airbnb model: enabling telecommunications companies (and other firms who own their own data centers) to make extra money by “renting” their unused server space to the public. These third party developers can use the extra computing power to develop cybersecurity, high bandwidth, and latency-focused applications for the Internet.

 Don’t bother starting out on any entrepreneurial journey unless you know you’re doing something you’re passionate about, because you’re going to be married to that concept for a long time.

What makes you different from the competition? What’s your secret sauce? While large data center operators like AWS, Microsoft’s Azure, and Google Cloud are just now understanding the potential of deploying on the Edge, by building our software infrastructure from scratch, we have the unique ability to build scalable and infinitely adaptable solutions for each one of our clients’ needs rather than a “one size fits all” solution like bigger players offer.

Unlike private cloud service providers like Openstack and Redhat, we create new sources of revenue for server owners by opening up their compute to third party developers. Since Mutable’s OS runs on top of any servers, we make ubiquitous compute more easily available for developers, while also empowering telcos and cable operators to improve their customer experiences.

How has your business been affected by COVID-19 and how are you adapting? At the same time as upending “business as usual,” COVID-19 also served to highlight the importance of reliable network infrastructure supporting mobile applications in our increasingly touch-less societies. While we were definitely moving in this direction before, we expect that being exposed by the pandemic will accelerate the adoption of edge solutions across sectors.

On a more personal note, the COVID pandemic has also changed the way we interact as a team with many now dealing with physical isolation as we shelter in place. This has led us to be much more empathetic towards each other in our weekly calls. The same has even transcended to our relations with partner companies as well — we’re keeping the conversation going until things open up again and we can get some of our projects rolling with them.

How are you using 5G technology? How does it make a difference for your company? Mutable’s public edge cloud is designed to facilitate developer app deployments through 5G. When crucial actions are being completed by these types of smart apps, latency needs to be as low as possible to make sure machine error is minimized. Mutable will leverage 5G networking capabilities to provide a ten-fold decrease in latency for app deployment over 4G.

What’s one piece of advice you’d give other entrepreneurs who are just starting out? This might sound corny, but it’s just so true and needs to be said: don’t bother starting out on any entrepreneurial journey unless you know you’re doing something you’re passionate about, because you’re going to be married to that concept for a long time. You’re going to go through a lot — and that sort of perseverance requires a true appreciation for your craft.

Transparent Path CEO Eric Weaver.

Founders: Eric Weaver, CEO.

Headquarters: Seattle, Wash.

What does your company do? We combine IoT sensors, blockchain security, and artificial intelligence to create a more agile, efficient, and certain supply chain for American food companies.

What makes you different from the competition? What’s your secret sauce? Unlike others creating point solutions that create value within silos, Transparent Path is unifying data across all partners within food supply chains: producers, processors, logistics, warehouse/DC, and retailers. By capturing and sharing data across the chain, we are creating a collaborative supply chain model that provides information more quickly to all parties.

How has your business been affected by COVID-19 and how are you adapting? If anything, COVID-19 revealed that our previously efficient supply chain for food is just as vulnerable to pandemic-related labor shortages as other sectors. We’ve all seen the news reports of outbreaks at food processing centers, impacting production, along with stories of farmers discarding unsellable product while food banks have been drained due to high demand. Logistics was hit when drivers were unable to find open restaurants, rest areas, truck stop showers, or parking spots in state parks.

What became obvious was the need for increased agility across the entire supply chain that would allow food companies to react more quickly to counter uncertainty and unforeseen disruption. That COVID disruption gave us the push to shift our focus from an efficiency play to one that creates efficiency, agility, and resilience

How are you using 5G technology? How does it make a difference for your company? Our utilization of 5G will come into play over the next 12-to-18 months. While most benefit messaging around 5G relates to speed, we are eager to utilize its much broader bandwidth.

What’s one piece of advice you’d give other entrepreneurs who are just starting out? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard “doesn’t sound like a viable idea.” “You’re not really CEO caliber.” “Someone already dominates that market.” Honestly, it’s like people WANT you to quit.

Take in advice, listen when good points are made, but also consider the source and the motive when the advice is negative. Lots of unhappy people out there right now. Don’t let their lack of imagination and enthusiasm drag you down.

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