Link Labs, a leading provider in asset tracking and monitoring solutions, began as an answer to two questions: 1) Where are my distributed assets? and 2) How are they doing?
In this conversation with Bob Proctor, CEO of Link Labs and a serial entrepreneur, we hear the Link Labs story – from securing angel investors, to the founding of the company in 2014, through those initial years of grinding and finding product market fit, and up to the present day as the company scales its growth and adjusts to the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Bob’s insights and experiences are instructive, and we know you’ll leave inspired to bring any initiative to life.
About Bob:
Bob Proctor is the co-founder and CEO of Link Labs, a leading provider of an end-to-end IoT platform for tagging, locating and monitoring equipment, supplies and assets anywhere at any time. With a PhD in applied physics and 25 years of entrepreneurial and business leadership, Proctor is also a founding principal of Blu Venture Investors, a venture capital investment company that supports early-stage entrepreneurs in the mid-Atlantic region of the U.S., which gives him a unique point of view on a wide range of emerging technologies and their novel applications and potential market viability.
About Dominic:
Dominic Marcellino is the director of strategy and business development at Kajeet. In this role, Dominic is responsible for expanding and strengthening Kajeet’s partnerships with system integrators, device manufacturers and solution providers, leading strategy for product and sales teams and refining customer experience. An expert in product, business development and sales with extensive expertise in bringing low-power IoT applications to market, Dominic’s strategic guidance strengthens Kajeet’s market position as a premier mobile virtual network operator for global enterprises.
Transcript:
0:00:00.0 Bob Proctor: You start to move into a world where the value proposition kinda crosses a tipping point, and suddenly you get into more of a mainstream market where everybody goes, “Well, this is at a level of product maturity and value proposition that it’s out of the box,” and the market just sort of starts to grow exponentially. And kind of watching that transition unfold, it’s been exciting, and so you’re always basically saying, “How can I make the next generation my product better than the last generation?”
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0:00:44.0 Dominic Marcellino: Welcome to But Did It Work? A podcast that explores successful IoT companies and the different paths they have taken to success. As always, I am your host, Dominic Marcellino. In this episode, I sit down with Bob Proctor. He’s a serial entrepreneur and investor, and he happens also be the CEO of Link Labs. Link Labs is a leading provider of asset tracking and monitoring solutions for logistics, industrial use cases, and other applications. And in full disclosure, I worked at Link Labs for five years prior to joining Kajeet. Bob and I talk about the founding of Link Labs and how Bob thinks about funding new companies. And we delve into the challenges that Link Labs has faced to find product market fit, and the pivots that the company has taken to thrive in the face of adversity. Along the way, we get into the challenges of entering a new market, why the best technologies don’t always win, and how scaling a company always comes down to people issues. We hope you enjoy the episode. Bob, thanks very much for being with us today.
0:01:43.6 BP: It’s my pleasure. Good to chat again, Dominic.
0:01:47.3 DM: Absolutely. I suppose it’s worth saying at the beginning that we know each other quite well, as I worked at Link Labs for several years, and joined a few months after the company was founded. And one of the reasons that I wanted you to be on the call today is to talk a bit about the founding of Link Labs and the journey that led from, I think a really awesome idea that maybe finally is seeing its day. But the pivots, and overcoming of challenges that Link Labs has managed over these eight years in the IoT space is definitely something that I think our listeners would learn a lot from. Yeah, so as we jump in, Bob, why don’t you start by telling a bit about how your own career journey led to you being an angel investor and helping to launch Link Labs.
0:02:39.1 BP: Yeah, happy to do so, and I’ll hopefully be able to keep it short enough. [laughter] I’m a scientist by training, PhD in Applied Physics, who had always been very entrepreneurial, and I think had a vision of having kind of a piece of me focused in technology, a piece focused in business and trying to bridge the gap between the two, if I go back to my mindset in grad school, and I probably took both extremes, if you will. I discovered, being a scientist, that you didn’t really learn anything about business, it was sort of pushed into a corner, and I went off and was just very fortunate to go into consulting, and spent five or six years there as sort of my accelerated business training. And then from there, Silicon Valley, I was fortunate enough to help in the dot-com era scale a company through an IPO, and then started investing on the side.
0:03:46.0 BP: And somewhere along that journey, I got very enamored with the notion of technical talent and developed a perspective that I called a critical mass of world class talent. And the feeling that if I could find a critical mass of world class talent in a particular domain, IoT in the case of Link Labs, my career has sort of assembled the elements to help that team go from nothing, a sheet of paper, to something, an investable entity. I spent a lot of time in marketing, sales, HR strategy, early stage finance, and all the things you need to sort of get a company off the ground. And so I said, “Why not get in at the very bottom floor?” So, Link Labs is the story of Bryan Ray and a team at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, as you know. And I felt like, “Gosh, these guys are really smart, and they wanna take what they were applying in the, sort of, federal sector, the government sector, and apply it into a commercial space.” And we saw some opportunities as the technology was evolving and that’s the essence of the beginning. I can get into the more specifics if you’d like. [laughter]
0:05:04.0 DM: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that the story is quite interesting because they were shown access to… This group, led by Brian, was shown access to the technology before it had been commercialized in the United States. And the two of you had been throwing around business ideas for years and as this opportunity came to you, you assembled the team, and got the company started, and it was oriented around a set of ideas that were both implemented and then clearly became something that couldn’t be scaled for the business to grow. And I think that that kind of journey from creating the first certified modules and gateways, and working on the over-the air protocol, and thinking about launching a national network, then into where we ended up in the middle-years before today, is a really interesting series of both developments, continued attempt to find product market fit, and eventually settling on something that worked and moving from there.
0:06:00.7 DM: But from today, the idea of a national network for LoRa is a no-brainer, and we had it in 2014. But building it, and figuring out what was gonna hang off of that network, has been kind of a typical, technical evolution, but one that is a journey in and of itself. And so, having just, kind of, highlighted what happened at the very high level, maybe just some insights at the backs and forths, and ups and downs, of that journey, maybe to the point where we started to focus on Air Finder would be really instructive, and then we can dig in deeper.
0:06:35.8 BP: Yeah, yeah. And I can talk a little bit about I think some of the naivete we had along the way. [laughter] So, the genesis of Link Labs is really that there was a government project that Brian and a team… The Applied Physics lab were working on, and then, lo and behold, they got an advanced copy of a chipset from a company at the time called Sicleo that really was a breakthrough in terms of the range performance or link budget for establishing a network for the internet of things. And it was an order of magnitude better than anything they thought was possible, and I thought, “Wow, there’s a chipset technical breakthrough, these guys have an advanced copy, going to have huge implications in the wireless industry. We can start a business around that,” and so we did. And I think there were a couple of assumptions that both didn’t pan out in our first generation of sort of strategy.
0:07:40.6 BP: The first assumption was that because we had advanced copy that we were gonna be the ones that could start to turn this into a commercial product and create a national network for the Internet of Things without really thinking through what would Verizon or AT&T do about this, and what would be a competitive response. We figured we’ve got access to some proprietary technology and first-mover advantage and that kind of stuff, and they’re big slow companies. So that was one assumption. The other assumption was that we could build a proprietary software layer on top of this radio, physical layer, and that the company that’s making the semiconductors ultimately got bought by Semtech, as you know, would basically partner with us to support our software stack that would be on top. Both of those assumptions, while seeming reasonably when we started a company, didn’t pan out. [laughter]
0:08:37.4 DM: Right.
0:08:38.9 BP: Right. What became apparent on the semiconductor side is Semtech did not want… So actually early in the days that the company flew to California, Brian was in Germany visiting his in-laws, getting up at 3:00 in the morning, I’m face-to-face with Semtech, and we’re like, “Hey, we have all this great software that goes on top of your chipset,” and they said, “We wanna give that away. We need the world to adopt this chipset, we don’t want a software tax put on top of it, which is how we think of you.” And so they went and developed a lesser, in our view, version of a software stack on top, which is now LoRaWAN, and we sort of fought against that tide for a while. But one of my mentors once said, “It’s very hard to compete with free.” [laughter]
0:09:29.2 DM: Right. [laughter]
0:09:33.4 BP: And we were competing with free, so that that was sort of mistake number one. And I likened it to, and still do, we had the Betamax version and VHS came out, and when Sony had Betamax and had a couple hundred patents on it, VHS came out as a free cheap version or a less expensive cheap version. Of course that dominated the VHS market in the ’80s. So anyway, that was mistake one, even though we had better technology. So it’s like, “What do you do with this product now that you can’t really partner a couple into the ecosystem of the chip company we’re supporting?” And then the other piece was on the carrier response, the standards body, it’s all sort of hindsight now, recognized this as a threat to the carriers and rolled out LTM and NB-IoT as standards to create Internet of Things networks, which brilliant software switch on to the towers of Verizon or AT&T and, voilà, you have a low-cost, low data rate outside the cellular networks or the rate plan’s Internet of Things network that’s national. Can’t compete with that either, right? So two assumptions seemed good on the surface, in hindsight, neither one panned out. So we’re left with a really interesting radio layer technology and not a lot of sales.
0:10:55.9 DM: Right. And a set of customers that let us know that there was something to what we were doing as well, right? That we had talked about supporting customers of ours who were developing their own applications and solutions using what we had developed, and that the pivot both from those initial assumptions not panning out to the first set of solutions that Link Labs created. And there’s two-fold elements there, one is you’re refocusing the team on the next thing, you know? “This didn’t work out, but we’re not stopping, we’re gonna keep going.” There’s an element of sort of change management as well as just simply company culture around trying things even if they’re hard and difficult and then they don’t pan out, it doesn’t mean that you did fail, it’s really, it didn’t work. It might have worked, but it didn’t work that time, let’s try the next thing. As well as looking at the move from kind of enablement to saying, “There are maybe one or two things that we wanna try to do that had broad applicability,” and that kind of pushed us in the direction of considering, “What’s happening?” Where the things actually are.
0:12:07.0 DM: I remember Brian had a really great line from way back in the day, “The Internet of Things doesn’t exist without the things, and the data is sort of coming from those things, and how you get it to the Internet in the end is either something that you make really easy or you can make quite difficult, but focusing there seem to be the move that we went to. And I’d be interested in hearing your retrospective on that focus around what became Air Finder, where asset tracking and monitoring end up being an area that seemed ripe for us to move into and how that kind of went from your point of view at the leadership level.
0:12:47.4 BP: Yeah, no, I think there were almost two pivots, or you might call it two parts to a pivot. The first was we had a network layer technology basically, and realized we couldn’t compete with free. But that was really being driven towards other companies were talking about building national networks off of that standard, and we didn’t wanna compete with the carriers. But recognizing that the Internet of Things is about things, and most things are stored in factories, and warehouses, and places in rural areas. You get into thinking about where most stuff is, and humans walk toward their cellular coverage, but things don’t.
0:13:35.8 DM: Interesting thing to say.
0:13:37.3 BP: And so just the notion of both there’s a private kind of enterprise market that would develop that we could say, “Well, forget the national dreams, go after the private commercial market, plenty of big market opportunity there,” and so that was sort of, “Let’s focus on commercial customers with large footprint facilities that need a private network capability,” particularly where there’s coverage gaps and the need for coverage augmentation. I think that was step one of the pivot. Step two was the notion that there aren’t that many companies that can put it all together, that would say, “Well, we’ll buy the wireless network layer technology from Link Labs and we’ll do a back-end IoT platform for another company, we’ll build the application from another company, and we’ll do another piece of solution, the deployment of the… ” Very few companies have the technical, particularly for a new field like this, the technical resources across multiple domains to actually put something together and deploy it.
0:14:44.9 BP: And so while we did win some customers on just being a piece of the solution, the vast majority of companies are looking to, the way I think about it is, “Write a check and have a problem go away.” [laughter] And so the problem was very simple, people wanted to know the answers to two very basic questions about distributed assets. One is, where are they? And the second one is, how are they doing? Have they’ve been damaged, basically. And that was most of the inquiries, and so if we can just simply provide you a solution of, “Here’s all your stuff, and here’s how it’s doing, and here’s where it’s moving around,” a lot of value in that. That’s what ultimately led to the pivot of make it easy for people to buy large market, and by the way, we can solve this problem because we have a… This was our differentiator, that we have a unique ability to stand up the network, internal on a facility.
0:15:39.0 DM: Yeah, and then the story becomes even more interesting as the first major commercial opportunity sort of became apparent for Link Labs in taking that product to, like I said, next level of development through a carrier competitors, some coopetition of slow-moving carrier, or at least the consulting arm of AT&T wanting to solve a specific problem that some of their customers were looking for, where our product did most of what was needed, but we had time both to figure out how to manufacture at scale and to develop, I guess, new iterations on our underlying technology in order to provide a solution for housekeepers and staff in hotels. And that offered a tremendous commercial opportunity for us, but also I think it must have been in your position a very risky proposition, ’cause we had to orient the entire engineering team around iterating on an initial product and standing up international manufacturing in order to reach the scale that they were looking for. How did you think about that opportunity weighed against the risk of doing… Sticking with what we had been doing before, and where were some of the decision points there that you found particularly interesting for somebody that was thinking about making big choices like that?
0:17:00.8 BP: Yeah, that’s a great question. They’re sort of pros and cons that you sort of weigh. To me, in an ideal state, you have what I would call a singles and doubles engine. You have a established product/market fit, you know what it takes to sell it, and you just sort of start turning the crank and you get deal after deal after deal. That, in many ways, I think it would be the preferred model. I think what I’ve learned, and particularly have come to appreciate in a business that has physical goods being produced in it, is that the problem with singles and doubles is that you don’t get to scale and scale at economics, and so you really can’t sell singles and doubles until you get the kinda unit cost down, and so you’re faced with this, “Well, if I can get the price at volume, I could sell at volume, but I can’t.”
0:18:01.1 BP: So you’re facing that kind of chicken and egg problem. And so what AT&T offered us is, basically with high customer concentration risk, the ability to get the scale very quickly and come down the cost curve. And so it was a bet. That is, on the pro side of that, obviously, is you add a lot of revenue heft, it allowed us to partner with tier one manufacturers, as you know, in Southeast Asia, we produced things at volume, it drove a lot of volume into our back-end software, that allowed us to add a lot of staff and attract more talented people into the organization who might have been saying, “Well, you’re a little too early stage for us, but now you’ve got a big customer, you’re scaling like crazy,” we’re able to attract some really strong talent. So a lot of positives, but super high customer concentration of risk. And as you know, the next chapter in the story [laughter] there is that, we got bitten by that with COVID.
0:19:04.0 DM: Yeah, absolutely. We did. And yet, at the same time, I wonder, would you have done things differently? I mean, I’m sure there were some big decision points for about a year, maybe 18 months ahead of the all-in, or maybe just the entire…
0:19:21.2 BP: No. I don’t think that at all. I think the benefits of scale and team, and what that did to our supply base and our partner ecosystem and the credibility of being able to deliver a solution at scale, all that makes you a different company. You’re not a company that’s doing small things or has only done stuff on a project basis for a large organization. You’ve delivered a solution at scale into an industry where you’re a market leader. It gives you the ability to say, “Okay, now I need to broaden out of that high customer concentration or industry sector into others.”
0:20:02.4 DM: Yeah. Absolutely. So one of the things that I wanted to get to is, over the course of the years, it’s now at least five, where focusing on how to provide more and more granular information about the location of things, moving from general location, down to understanding which use cases and which companies actually need finer and finer grained location, one of the things that we learned in that, the housekeeping world, was that you gotta get the floor right, because at a minimum, if you’re gonna dispatch somebody to go help, say someone who’s in need, if you get the room number right, maybe not the right floor, if you’re one floor above, that’s not good enough.
0:20:43.3 DM: It might be totally fine for locating an object, ’cause you can just go down there, but if there’s an emergency response, well, that really matters. And so, part of the journey was adding technological capabilities to the original system in order to get the floor right. But that was a process that then led to additional desire to innovate, and the product that you and Link Labs released last year, this iteration on that that you call XLE gets you some X, Y, Z precision that didn’t exist before. And I’m curious, as that was happening, ’cause it’s obviously awesome, but there has to also be a really strong product market fit for introducing that and to putting it forward and marketing around it. What are the use cases in asset tracking where that kind of precision is not just a “nice to have” but maybe a “have to have?”
0:21:36.2 BP: What I love about where Link Labs is or these companies in general, any company in general is, what tends to happen is each product generation gets a stronger and stronger and stronger value proposition. That can be the capability of the product, or it can be… You get to a scale where you’re gonna be able to drop the price on the product and still make an economic. And in a large market, where most perspective customers, basically is do nothing, what tends to happen is you start to move into a world where the value proposition kinda crosses a tipping point and suddenly you get into more of a mainstream market where everybody goes, “Wow, this is at a level of product maturity and value proposition that it’s out of the box,” and the market just starts to grow exponentially. And kind of watching that transition unfold has been exciting, and so, you’re always basically saying, “How can I make the next generation of my product better than the last generation?”
0:22:38.6 BP: Because I know it’s generally going to open up more market surface area, either from a psychographic perspective, I’m really conservative, I gotta see this work in other places, or from a product performance perspective, This is where you are going with your question, where do you see the use cases that show the need? In the use case side, a great example really is what we saw, and I think you experienced this directly in a couple of production lines for work-in-process tracking. So, in work-in-process, there’s tape on the floor. You wanna know dwell time on a workstation. So, you may say, “Well, that tape on the floor is room width or desk width, and so, what’s the accuracy you need to know when something crosses that line?” You want it to be stable after it crosses the line. So, if you have three to five meters of accuracy, what you’re really saying is that line is more like a table width on the… It’s unrealistic. You start bouncing between work stations and so your data around like, “What’s my dwell time on any workstation?” Is meaningless because the noise in your system is, it doesn’t allow you to across that internal boundary.
0:23:50.5 BP: And so, as you get more accurate and you get down to meter or sub-meter, and now you can start to say, “Well, I can figure out when I’m crossing a line.” And work-in-process tracking becomes really interesting, ’cause it couples on built Lean Six Sigma initiatives and how do you improve product production throughput and those kind of things. The other thing is with XLE we have improved battery life, so I can take a post and stamp tag now and put it on a crescent wrench or a calibrated instrument and have it last three to five years, whereas earlier on we could only have that last six to nine months. And that difference is, five years before I replace a battery is something that’s mental belief. Something that you would accept for six months, it’s like, “There’s no way I’m tagging 10,000 tools in six months from now, tagging them again,” right?
0:24:35.1 DM: Exactly. No, and what’s fascinating is the bar at which even just the action of re-tagging, forget replacing batteries, which I think is an interesting proposition, the sort of logistics of a personnel in order to carry that off is no mean feat. But yeah, the extension of battery life in these applications is critical, because it almost makes the entire solution possible or not from the point of view of a buyer. They need to think of it in a certain number of years, because if it’s three to five, they know that when they re-up, they’ll buy your next generation thing, and you’ll have something even better, or worst case, they’ll just do it again. But the willingness to throw things away and start over is quite interesting. Some of the work we’re doing in remote patient monitoring there, people want devices, they’re like, “We’ll just use it once,” and that one has to be economic in and of itself.
0:25:29.8 DM: As you think about the business itself, right? For many businesses, from restaurants to startups, surviving is in and of itself like a mark of success, but then there’s sort of that move from, “You made it a certain amount of time,” to, “You’ve actually made it to some sort of level of objectives that you were seeking for the company itself.” What would you say about how to move through those, particularly the growth stages of a company when you’re running a startup, not just from, “Were we successful?” but also just managing the change of a company over time, when it grows from 10 people to 50 people to 100 people, and your sales go from a couple million to 25 million to 50 million. You’ve been through scaling at a bunch of different companies. What does that journey look like for somebody and where are those unexpected challenges for somebody that’s thinking about getting into the startup world?
0:26:34.1 BP: It’s another great question. The way I think about it is, once you solve all the product problems or you feel like you’ve got the product nailed, then they go to market problems and the commercial problems and everything else, the one set of problems that is ever occurring are people problems. [laughter] And it’s because of the… And part of that is just inherent to the nature of scaling. As you add a lot of staff, roles have to get narrower, so you’re in a position that as you scale the organization, some people just can’t grow as fast as the company is growing, and so you bring people in over their head, painful conversation, “You used to run all this, and now I’m gonna bring somebody over you to run it, ’cause I think we need to have a more seasoned or experienced at this kind of scale point leadership.” The other thing is jobs get narrower. So you used to have all this scope, and now I’m asking you to give up half of your world and just kind of focus down. People in managerial and leadership positions, it feels like you’re taking away or you’re limiting upside, and that’s a very difficult thing to navigate. And the faster you scale, the faster you’re going through those sets of challenges in terms of constantly narrowing people’s roles and potentially adding people over them.
0:28:02.1 DM: That makes sense. Especially if you move somebody from being an individual contributor and they’re in several different places to them being in a management role, it’s a really difficult transition because it feels like you’re being told that you can’t, or weren’t doing a good job, or can’t do that job anymore. And yet that’s in fact not the case. I’m reminded of apparently one of Johnny Rockefeller’s management piece of advice to people at the higher level in his staff was, “You hire somebody to do your job so you can go do something else, and that’s how our company grows in capabilities.”
0:28:35.3 BP: The other dimension to it is around, I think, you’re figuring out processes versus operating processes. But, you know, as you scale, you have more and more people. After a while, you get to a point where people don’t even know each other, right? The organization is bigger than your capacity to know everyone’s name or what they do. And then you need process and process definition, process discipline, and so that kind of early stage, amorphous, everybody is jack of all trades, you just stick your head in the hallway and say, “Hey, how do we get this done?” That appeals to a group of people who like broad scope and unstructured work, and then when you scale some in hundreds typically, of people, the work has to be very structured, it has to be very process-driven, and all that fun, unstructured stuff feels like moving to structured work and interfacing with other functions and process, and that’s what people call bureaucracy, right? I can’t get things done quickly anymore. [laughter] And so you have a lot of tension around that need for process and process discipline, and it just doesn’t fit necessarily with people who enjoy the earliest stages of start-up because it didn’t have a lot of bureaucracy associated with, they could just get stuff done by grabbing people…
0:29:57.7 DM: And nobody being there to tell them, “No,” or, “We’re doing it otherwise.” That was fun, but now being years removed from that now, I also see that, and you were totally right when you were doing this, the value of creating those processes and continually iterating on them, and there’s a whole industry is built around doing that and doing that well. But one of the things that is hard to manage as a process is innovation, and Link Labs has an amazing history of innovation, technological and process innovation in the Internet of Things. How do you see fostering that sense inside of a company that is going through that bureaucratization at the same time? Because you can’t really have one without the other when you’re trying to grow in an industry like this, but there’s an interesting tension there, and I wonder if you have any thoughts on that.
0:30:50.2 BP: Yeah, I can answer that more from a personal perspective. I think I naturally have a bias towards innovation, just being entrepreneurial all along and having a technical background, so I like talking with people who are innovating in the organization and delivering the message of, “Hey, that could be transformative, you gotta run with that.” Or about time on the side of the desk you’ve got CEO air cover. So I think, at least for me, it sort of starts with a piece of my role, which is making sure that people have an opportunity to highlight things as they’re thinking about innovating on it, it may or may not work, and then saying, “Hey, I’m creating air cover for you to go ahead and work on those things,” and highlighting it as something that you’ll get rewarded for and recognized for.
0:31:47.6 DM: No, that’s good. Maybe one last question and then we’ll wrap up, I really appreciate your time. So you have XLE, you’ve been in this space with Link Labs for coming up on eight years, I think Valentine’s day 2014 is the founding, if I recall. You’re eight years in, and there were certain things whose day has finally come that we were thinking about, but maybe looking one to two years in the future, where are some of the business problems or industry needs that you and the team are really focused on or think will be really fun problems to solve?
0:32:24.4 BP: That’s a great question, sort of looking out. I think for us it is, we’ve been in a journey to create a product and solution, but ultimately if you wanna be a player at a massive scale, you’re tying into kinda that global player ecosystem, and you’ve gotta rethink, “Where do we fit in that ecosystem as a whole industry matures? What’s the natural place for us and how were we gonna play and what does that mean?” And interesting enough that takes us potentially back more towards at least internationally, a horizontal player, even though we’ve kind of migrated domestically of saying, “People wanna write a check and have their problem go away and create a solution.” But at the same time, if you look at any multinational, they’ve been watching this industry mature, maybe playing around with solution buyers in different geographies. But what I’m starting to see is the large multinationals probably are starting to think about, “Well, what solution is right for us?” And as the industry standards mature and those kind of things. “What do I want?” And we’re not going to scale a global sales force.
0:33:43.8 BP: Who you’re partner with and who are they choosing from a platform side, and who do you have to integrate with and what’s your true value add. And that ironically for us it comes back down to indoor location capability with both in accuracy and a cost advantage will alter the competition, like that’s where we’re better than everybody else. In our wireless backhaul, it has gotten us where we are now, but I think there are emerging technologies that could be standardized around that, so in a weird way, you kind of go through this cycle of, we were a proprietary in one area hoping that people would integrate our stuff and that didn’t work ’cause we were too early for the industry, so we’re building a full stack solution. The rest of the industry is kind of maturing along the way, and then you kinda gotta retreat back to, at least on a global or international basis, where do you fit in that ecosystem at scale. So I think that’s kind of what I see is hopefully we’ll be a multinational, you know, or selling internationally, truly integrated with a bunch of international partners in a few years, where just the stuff that we really excel at is a core part of the industry fabric. And that’s what you want.
0:35:00.2 DM: Absolutely. I think that you just described what happens in the beginning, no one’s doing any of the parts, and if you only focus on one, you still don’t have anything, so you have to kind of dabble in everything to get started and eventually you can go back to the area that you… You wanna be focused on the area where you have tremendous expertise and capabilities and, yeah, it’ll be an interesting story to play out over the next couple of years, and I’m looking forward to following the journey. Thanks a lot, Bob, for being here today. I appreciate the conversation.
0:35:28.3 BP: Thanks, Dominic for having me, and good luck with your Kajeet, and everything that’s unfolding with you and happy to join you again in the future.
0:35:36.3 DM: Alright, sounds good.
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