Unknown Speaker 0:00 hotspot hosts are the most important part of the helium ecosystem. That's why fair spot gives 70% of mining revenue to our hosts with payouts every Friday. Unlike other services that offer as little as 20% and keep the rest of themselves, we put you first by sending you a free hotspot and giving you your fair share of the earnings. No referral programs, no hype, just a shared mission to grow the helium network and empower you to monetize your airspace without any upfront investment. Learn more at fair spot dot host Unknown Speaker 0:38 Welcome to the hotspot. I'm your host Armand does really hard to Monday. Today, we're joined by helium co founder and CEO Amir Helene, who guides us through helium his journey to build a wireless network for low power sensors. It's a fascinating story filled with twists and turns, failure and success. And one overarching mission to fill an aching demand in the tech world. That for some reason, nobody has been able to fill until now. We cover lots of ground here, including the beginnings of the company, fundraising technology choices, the crypto economic model and visions for the future. A fair warning, our discussion gets fairly technical at times. But even if you're not technically inclined, I urge you to stick around, especially if you're interested in the grand idea of building a network that's powered and owned by people. Not big telcos. Unknown Speaker 1:30 Amir, welcome to the show. Thanks. Thanks for having me. Pleasure to pleased to be here. So to kick things off, I want to hear your elevator pitch. What is helium? And why should people care about it? Unknown Speaker 1:43 I think I don't know if this is an elevator version. I haven't perfected the elevator version that only comes when I'm, you know, deep in some fundraising mode or something. But but the the general pitch is that there's sort of two levels of pitch, right? One is, we need a different type of wireless network for low power things. Like that's the simple way of thinking about it, right. But we, a decade ago, people started talking about the Internet of Things and you know, machine to machine communication and the way that sort of life and the world could be improved if we knew more data about the physical world, in the same way that we know lots of data about the digital world world and like, you know, pet fads like big data, no SQL and whatever, they have sort of driven all of that. But there hasn't really been an equivalent thing in sort of real life, right? Like, where are the sensors everywhere that tell us about radiation or particle of particulates in the air or humidity or, you know, he's your food safe, and all that kind of stuff. Unknown Speaker 2:39 And so the goal of helium really is to sort of enable a new type of wireless network that it's at its core, right? Like we need, in our opinion, we need this sort of low power infrastructure, and we don't have it. The second way of thinking about helium is perhaps a little bit different, which is a sort of a community built. People build network, right. And that's a new concept as well, in the same way that I think Airbnb allowed random people to become hotel operators or be Uber allowed people to operate a cab company themselves. Unknown Speaker 3:11 Helium is a way for you to monetize your infrastructure, right? You've got real estate and internet access, and power. And those are all things that you need in order to operate a wireless network, but basically, right and so the traditional model has been the telcos go and acquire that those things themselves, like they acquired cell towers and rooftops and whatever else, and helium is a different model for that, right. Like prior to helium, there was no way for a random consumer to participate in the telco economic infrastructure. And helium is a sort of way to do that. So two pitches, maybe? Unknown Speaker 3:46 That's great. Yeah, I've definitely found the Airbnb sort of comparison, pretty useful when I'm talking to somebody about hosting hotspots. Unknown Speaker 3:56 Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, I think Airbnb was super interesting, because like, if you wanted to operate a hotel yourself, you have very little chance of doing that right prior prior to Airbnb and the telco industry is sort of the same, perhaps even worse, right? Because it's even more insidious. Like, you need more than just interest, you need more than just real estate, right? You need access to like licensed spectrum. And it's like this very closed off like boys club, that the average person is never going to get to infiltrate, right? And so helium is sort of the start of an idea there. Really, it's like, why wouldn't we build all the wireless networks this way, like to today? It's a low power one. Unknown Speaker 4:33 But eventually, it could be anything, but you could run an LTE or 5g network or practically any type of wireless network this way, and why wouldn't you do it that way, given given the chance, right? Unknown Speaker 4:43 So you've got this, this really interesting concept of sort of democratizing the creation of a wireless network. And it's working so far, seemingly, I mean, you've got over 4000 hotspots out there in the wild. And that's a tremendous achievement. Unknown Speaker 5:00 But I'd love to take a shallow dive into the history of the company. Because a majority of companies in the blockchain space were started in the last two to three years, and only a handful have been around longer than that. And most people probably don't know that helium was originally founded in 2013. And had nothing to do with blockchain. So what was the initial mission of helium? How did the team assemble and who was involved? Unknown Speaker 5:27 Yeah, that's a long, long story, but I'll try and make it sane. Unknown Speaker 5:33 So Mike, might just for a second, like, My background is in the video game industry, like I was a long time ago, a pro eSports player, like in the late 90s. You know, like, I was literally like the best quake one and Quake three player in the world. Unknown Speaker 5:49 And that was super interesting. Like, firstly, there was no one playing games at the scale that they are now right. So like the the universe of quake players, it was in the hundreds or 1000s, that were, you know, that were good. And there's a lot of reasons for that, right? Like it was inaccessible, like you needed to build a PC yourself, and you needed some way of getting a fast internet connection. And that just like, wasn't an option at like 97, or 98, unless you were a student, or worked in an office with the T one. Unknown Speaker 6:15 But that introduced me to a lot of things that I sort of helped me start my career and I worked at a Swedish startup that ended up building like Battlefield 1942, we were acquired by EA. And you know, that that sort of led me into my video game career. And through that, I met Shawn Fanning, who was the founder of Napster somewhere along the way. And we, you know, just stayed in touch. And we had a friend circle that all knew each other. And, I don't know, probably 2012 at some point, Unknown Speaker 6:42 really, we had a friend of ours by Chris Bruce. Unknown Speaker 6:47 That was starting a baby monitor company called spratling. Right? Like, they were trying to build a baby boy, it's like an apple watch for babies. But basically, except that the baby obviously wouldn't look at the watch, it was more like a Fitbit, or something like that. And the problem was, that the only way to sort of do anything power efficient in terms of connectivity was use Bluetooth, right. And the problem with Bluetooth was that the range was, you know, as you guys know, feet, like dozens of feet, right? If you if you're, if you're lucky. And what he wanted was something different to that, right. Like, I want to just be able to, like take this thing outside, just like I do a cell phone, and it should just work, you know, wherever it is. And I think that was really the start of the conversation that that we started having between us and and Chris and Shawn were friends. And you know, we were all in the sort of same group. And that led us to have this conversation about well, what if we could build a wireless network designed for sensor like Why is no one done that and and there were some interesting new technologies that had just appeared like Laura had just been born. But back then Laura land wasn't the thing. But the Laura technology existed in 2013. and stuff and just generally started to become a lot cheaper and a lot more sort of Unknown Speaker 7:55 experimental in nature, like ti had a bunch of chips that were all sudden really interesting for this stuff. And so that was, you know, that was really the start of the conversation. And so it was like Shawn and I and, and sort of Chris influenced a little bit. Unknown Speaker 8:08 When a co founder, this guy, Sean Carey, that came from Basha, which is this distributed system database company that had built the backend for like my message and and, you know, had generally had a pretty good distributed systems background. And that was really the conversation and said that the mission at the start was really like, let's build a wireless network. And the reason we thought it might work at time actually was a very different reason, then we ended up sort of pursuing was that TV stations were starting to go digital. And so all this leftover spectrum that they used to occupy was being Unknown Speaker 8:40 unlicensed, right, they now call this whitespace, right? Like this was this was sort of the whitespace movement where these TV stations were leaving these channels. And we were like, maybe this is an opportunity to do something that couldn't have been done prior, right? Like these channels, these frequencies weren't available before. And so they are now. Unknown Speaker 8:55 But yeah, things took many, many twists and turns. But the mission was always the same. It was always like, how do we build a wireless network that these things can use. And over the years, it just sort of became obvious and apparent to us that trying to do it in a traditional centralized model was never going to work. Right. And I think we've seen other companies try and do that over the years, whether it is ingenue used to be called onramp wireless or CIG Fox, or you know, some of the current guys that machine Q and Senate, and it's a tough business, because you've got to build infrastructure yourself, you got to pay for the hardware, you got to pay for the real estate and the electricity and, and you're talking about sensors that are going to pay, you know, cents or dollars a year or something like that, to use the network. And so it's very difficult to figure out an ROI that makes sense versus something like an LTE network where you've got, like iPhones on the thing that are you know, 100 $200 a month or something in our lives. So it's a very difficult business to make work in the traditional model. Unknown Speaker 9:51 And that was, you know, sort of lead us down the path of where we where we ended up today, basically. Unknown Speaker 9:58 That's great. Can you can you walk Unknown Speaker 10:00 goes through some of the key iterative points and pivots, where you sort of hit a wall. And we're like this is no longer working. Unknown Speaker 10:07 I know that, for example, there was at least one version of the helium hotspot before the current design that was sold to the public ever. No, we've got lots of different versions. And so the first thing that we built with this ada 215, four based protocol, and so 15 four is this, you know, IEEE standard that is probably most well known for being the physical layer for ZigBee, which is a low power sensor network technology. And we had acquired this small company in Colorado that had a lot of 15. For expertise, I've got like, one of the guys there was like, you know, the Secretary of the ZigBee standard, and we knew the 15 flower, or they knew they knew the 15 for technology deeply. Unknown Speaker 10:50 And so at that time, we was like, Okay, let's use 15 for right, like, that seems like a good way to at least start this. And so we have this, the very first version of the hotspot, not even a hotspot, we call it a bridge was this extraordinarily complicated hardware thing, because it had five or six different wireless radios on it, it was like Bluetooth, wireless, 2.4 gigahertz sub gigahertz. Unknown Speaker 11:17 And, you know, it was the, the concept was similar, we just didn't have the right incentive. But we had no incentive. In fact, it was, it was, you know, buy this thing and help us build this network, right. And the result of building this network is that there's going to be this, you know, open infrastructure that anyone can use to build products on top of right. And so we went pretty far down that, that path, we had hardware, we had the SDKs, and sort of the server side infrastructure. And so this was pre lorawan, Morrowind didn't exist here. And like, arguably, if we had decided to use Laura, instead of 54, I'm guessing that Lauren would have been built on top of like what we built because it's very, very similar in design. This is 2013, like before Laura, when had had really been conceived. And so it was the same sort of notion, right? Like, you should be this relatively sort of broadcast base network where you could sort of wander around between between the different base stations, and it should be low power, and it somehow be low cost. And what we just hadn't figured out was like, how, how you would do that? Like, what was the incentive for like people to like, build this network other than participants? Right? Like, if you were, if you were a company, I remember we've worked with companies like Target and the funnily enough, like door bought, which became ring and like, all the all these other companies back then Unknown Speaker 12:35 that were trying to do stuff like this. And you know, like in the ring case, they wouldn't have used it for video, but they would have used it for provisioning, for example, right? So there were a lot there were lots of these hybrid cases. But the problem was still the same. It's like, unless you were like an actual device company, there was no reason for the network to exist, right? There was no reason for a random participant to put one of these bridges up. And so that led us into a different kind of pivot where it's like, Okay, well, what if we took this technology and tried to apply it in this sort of very verticalized? Way, right. And so if you'd looked at someone like Sam SAR, like, I would call that like, sort of best example of doing as well, right, where they picked the vertical, which is like fleet monitoring or fleets of applications. And they built like a complete end to end product and went after that vertical. And we, you know, dabbled in various verticals like that, you know, we were in some restaurants for a while, and then took them hospitals for a while he tells hospitality. Unknown Speaker 13:28 But again, it's just difficult. I mean, I think we were, our DNA as a company was not to do that, right. Like our DNA was a platform company that that sort of at its core wanted to build open source technology that was broadly adopted. And so trying to like, be trying to sort of emulate what Sam sorry, did was like a alien for us, like it was sort of forcing ourselves to do something that we really didn't want to do. And maybe I'm just speaking for myself, and just sort of like, making it sound like everyone agreed with me, but that was, that was sort of my feeling. Unknown Speaker 13:56 And then several years ago, we, you know, it started just thinking again, it's like, Okay, what if there was a way to like, incentivize people to do the first idea, and at that, at that point, you know, Bitcoin had become mainstream, you know, maybe no one hope maybe not everybody holds Bitcoin, but everyone certainly knows what it is, right? And aetherium was known and like Coinbase, was succeeding. And so all of a sudden, it was like a kid coins are a thing now, you know, this notion of like tokens and incentive models that, that are bootstrapping networks was was all of a sudden the thing that people understood. And so we revisited it, one of our engineers wrote, like, what I would consider, like the very first white paper of the sort of current model. And that sort of started the path that we're down on, which is like, let's revisit the original idea, like, what if we could build a network? What if there was a different way to incentivize it that just wasn't really viable or possible, you know, back in 2013, maybe it was we just dumped we were just too dumb to find it. But but we didn't think it was a thing that we could have done back then. That's really interesting. So you start you started out basically Unknown Speaker 15:00 Trying to fulfill different niches and then go from there. Unknown Speaker 15:04 and expand, is that correct? So what I mean, the original goal was always very naive, it was like, let's just build wireless networks somehow, and then people will use them, because there's all these use cases that people should should, you know, should be building. Unknown Speaker 15:18 And, you know, I think there was nothing true about that statement, other than, like, how would you actually build the network, and we, we hadn't figured that out. And there was no reason for, you know, random consumers or participants to, to just go buy one of these bridges and help build the network. And that was really the whole problem with the thing. And so the original mission was always there, the sort of look at or the pivot into, like, let's build verticalized applications was never the goal. That was just a, you know, well, that first idea isn't working properly. And we have this technology like, what can we you know, what can we apply it to? Unknown Speaker 15:53 But I think somewhere, it always felt like unfinished business that we needed to address. And so I was very excited to like, get back to move with this sort of blockchain powered version of itself. So your initial idea was sort of to work with restaurants and hotels, as you said, as like a means to an end was your thinking that if you could get these businesses to deploy networks, that that would be a starting point to sort of figure out some way to get other businesses to deploy networks, or at least get some coverage going out? Yeah, exactly. I think we had this sort of three tiered model in our head where some sort of combination of enthusiasts and users and businesses and Unknown Speaker 16:29 but you know, it's hard, like you, you don't really have a reason to do this, unless you're building application yourself. And you're not going to build the application yourself, unless there's sort of broad coverage that you can take advantage of, depending depending on the use case. So you had a very much a chicken egg problem that it was unclear how to solve. And so we just sort of said, like, add, that's not gonna, that's not going to work. And so we moved away from this broad network idea, into, you know, let's build solutions for people that have problems in a specific location, like in a factory in a restaurant in a hospital to like, get a warehouse or whatever. But that never felt right. You know, that was, you know, that was never, I never felt like the right thing to do. Like, I am naively a big believer in, in sort of purpose of companies, I think there was a lot of ways for us to like to make a lot more money than we've made. Unknown Speaker 17:20 And I'm sure some of our investors are mad at me for not pursuing those. But that never felt like what we were supposed to do, or why we started the business. And so this, you know, this feels like a much more natural path for us, and still solving an extraordinarily large unsolved problem in the world. That's really interesting. So you kind of started off with the Amazon approach of sell books first. But then you sort of realized that that didn't quite fit, you couldn't quite take that model and just copy it and then have it work. And actually, we started with the sell everything for us at the start at the very start, we were just like, let's just build a network and let's build tools, and then figure it out. Right. And, and, actually, that was, it wasn't terrible, it we have a lot of traction and a lot of interest in that in the early days. The problem was, there was no way to like, feasibly grow this network, right, we had, you know, I think two or 300 beta users in San Francisco is probably 2014. And there was no way that we could figure out how to turn that into 10s of 1000s, you know, across the country. And so that's what led us into this sort of vertical approach. So we sort of went from the the sell everything to sell books back to sort of sell everything Unknown Speaker 18:29 sort of approach except this time around with a different sort of incentive model than we did in the first place, which we think makes all the difference. So we'll get to the helium hotspot itself in a future episode, but I saw your blog that you've got a couple of iterations, or at least one other iteration of the helium hotspot that never made it to the public. Why did that never get released? And can you talk more about that? Yeah, so the original vision of of helium was to build a new wireless protocol at the same time, like we weren't very satisfied before aware, or our 802 15 four protocol that we'd built for a variety of reasons. And so we started building a wireless protocol at the start that was called width. Unknown Speaker 19:12 And, you know, the goal there was that it would fix some of the things that we really didn't like about Laura. And at the time, those were things like, okay, I want Fine Time Stamping of packets without having to spend 1000s of dollars on a gateway. And I want to be able to send arbitrary size data and have the protocol, chunk that up for me and not be you know, restricted to certain packet sizes, stuff like that. Right. And that was, you know, that was a lot of our motivation behind why we were building whip. And there was a, you know, decent list list of reasons. And so part of that was we wanted the hardware to be very open. Right, so one of the downsides of Laura is that it is a closed Unknown Speaker 19:53 source, physical layer and the modulation scheme owned by Symantec. And we didn't really like that and I think that they're getting Unknown Speaker 20:00 Think better about this, like to their credit, they are moving very heavily in the direction of, of opening this. And I'd be surprised if they didn't completely open it at some point in the future. But they've gotten, you know, more diversity in terms of who the manufacturers are the partners are that are building more chips. But at the time, it was really just semtech. And I think there was one other Chinese sort of very untypical herb RF. And we were, you know, we wanted it to be possible to use helium using practically any sub gigahertz radio out there. And part of you know, part of the way that we were going to do that was to build this hotspot that was a software defined radio. So like a very high capacity, SDR, we got pretty far that like I have one here, you won't see it that well in this thing, because it will get cropped out. But it looks similar to the current hotspot except inside. Lastly, it's vastly different inside. And this was a Unknown Speaker 20:51 very novel Software Defined architecture inside that was still reasonably cost effective to produce. Unknown Speaker 20:59 And what it meant was that you would have a hotspot that could listen to like practically anything here over the over over the air and use software to decode it, right. And Unknown Speaker 21:10 so this was super interesting. The downside of this was that there isn't any off the shelf hardware that looks like this, right? There's a few maker II sort of things that you can put together and there are SDR is on a USB stick. And you know, there there are other ways to do this. But what we what we came to realize over time, and probably everyone is like listening to this and be like, yeah, that's all Bs, like you're an idiot, probably probably true. Was that like latching on to like a bigger ecosystem is just just better and easier, right? Like, if you build something like whip or long fires, we ended up calling it you have to bootstrap the whole thing from scratch, right? There are no devices, there are no hardware out there on the market that just natively worked to this day. And so we decided at some point that just switching to both Laura as a technology was was smarter, because we could build the gateway much more cheaply than trying to do this SDR thing on our own. There were existing manufacturers in the space already, like there's dozens of gateway manufacturers already in the Laura ecosystem. And then eventually with the switch to Laura, where it's like there's, you know, 1000s upon 1000s of existing sensors in the in the in the ecosystem that already work with this protocol. And so that's a much easier proposition than, you know, let's bootstrap the whole thing like hardware, you know, device side firmware, like everything, and it was just, it just was too much like it was too slow, too painful, like deals were getting held up that we were trying to do, because we didn't have like downlink support. And I was like, This is stupid. You know, like, there's, there's already a protocol that has download support. Everyone already uses it. We don't like a lot of parts of it. Unknown Speaker 22:41 But you know, it's just the lesser of two evils. And I think it's helped us go a lot faster, being able to just sort of latch on to an existing thing, rather than try and build it ourselves. That makes a ton of sense. There are definitely a ton of lorwyn devices out there. Although not necessarily in the US. According to my own research, there isn't really any widely deployed, or at least definitely not publicly available or whenever in the US. Although in the EU, it seems like actually there are a couple of countries that are completely covered. And more or when, from more traditional type carriers. Yeah, that's true. Unknown Speaker 23:16 You've got a combination of things, you've got the things network, which is a sort of open community built lorawan network, you could say similar in nature to what we're doing, but I think, perhaps fundamentally different in a lot of ways. And then you've got the sort of carriers. So traditional telcos to have built large networks themselves, those, those are guys like orange and France and KPN in Holland. Unknown Speaker 23:41 And the problem with those carrier operated networks is that they don't have a great economic structure, right, it's still quite expensive. Unknown Speaker 23:50 To use those networks, the coverage is great, because there are some big backing Laura gateway locations on top of their their LTE infrastructure. Laura has very good range, but the cost of using those networks, at least in the conversation that we've always had with people has always been prohibitive. So they've never really taken off. And in the States, there's like nothing here, you know, you've got I think Senate is is sort of the probably the largest other operator outside of helium. Unknown Speaker 24:16 Comcast took a shot at this with an initiative called machine Q and, you know, they had hoped to sort of leverage a lot of their existing infrastructure that doesn't seem to have worked out. So you know, it's a tough problem. You know, like, if you're going to solve it a traditional way, you're, I think, at least in the States, you're not gonna make it just because the landmass is just so large that you need, you need so much, you. You need such a massive footprint to put a dent in, in coverage. And in this country. We've seen you guys like sigfox. Try that and it started and then ended up just sort of backing out and leaving. I think they're actually trying to sell their us network right now. So yeah, it's not easy. It's not a criticism of them as much as like, it's just hard. It's hard. It's hard and expensive. Unknown Speaker 25:00 That's definitely a great point that the landmass of the US, I mean, we've seen this play out the traditional cellular carrier market, where T Mobile has come in with a sort of revolutionary model, at least revolutionary in the US, you know, unlimited data and whatnot. And they want huge spectrum auctions, totaling, I think, 10s of billions of dollars. And they start to build out this network. And then they've been added for five plus years with this, you know, really top notch team, and they're really taking it really seriously. And they still have tons of coverage gaps that they need to work on. So it's pretty clear that this country is unique, especially given the our mass amount of rural sort of square miles that are out there. Unknown Speaker 25:43 Yeah, and those guys have to make an ROI calculation at some point, right? Like, if they're going to create all of this network coverage in these rural areas, like are there enough 100 $200 a month customers there to make it worthwhile, right. And, again, that's it's just so expensive to do all of this, Unknown Speaker 26:00 that sort of approaching this with a completely different model, where it's sort of a, you know, participants in the network are economically incentivized to sort of do it on their own, and some act as their own sort of little cell towers, you know, we think is the only sane way to try and build, especially the low power networks, but might also be true, or we think it's true for things like 5g networks, where there are different physics involved, and the range of a base station is extremely low, it's hard to imagine how any carrier even at the size of like Verizon, and Vodafone or, you know, whatever other entity would ever be able to deploy enough 5g base stations, to create anything that looks like you know, full coverage. And so I think it's highly likely that this model that we are trying here is, is the way that wireless networks always get built, you know, going forward, whether it's helium or some other thing in the future, it to me makes sense that you would, you would sort of choose this option versus spending 10s, or hundreds of billions of dollars trying to build the infrastructure yourself, it definitely makes a lot of sense, when you look at the helium pricing model, you'll see that you know, you're pricing yourself probably 10 times lower than any of the carriers in Europe that are offering more when at a minimum. And this pricing model could simply never be achieved by us telco, they were building on the traditional fashion, leasing cell tower, you know, space and power and fiber, and paying for the labor. Just everything in the spectrum, everything that goes into it all these costs, versus just using sort of the existing infrastructure of people's homes and businesses which have power have internet and operate in unlicensed spectrum for free, you can see why there's a sort of massive difference in the possibility to create a really low cost network there. Unknown Speaker 27:48 Yeah, and I think the thing that's interesting, the thing that enables that, as far as I'm concerned, is the sort of crypto economic, economic model, you know, like, everyone gets to sort of participate in this model without needing us, right, like we are, you know, a sideshow eventually in its whole network, right. Like today, we, you know, we are the sort of core maintainers, and we launched the thing, but we need to be here long term, right. And arguably, and I think that's an important point. Unknown Speaker 28:20 Because it means that, Unknown Speaker 28:23 you know, you're not, you're not joining our network like you are, you're building your own network that happens to be powered by technology that we devised. And I don't think that's a concept that any traditional telco would ever get behind. Unknown Speaker 28:36 It just doesn't fit with the model that they've they've always pursued in the same way that Airbnb didn't fit in like Hilton or Hyatt model until it's, you know, way too late. And Unknown Speaker 28:48 and I think it's only possible, you know, when you power this thing, sort of in this crypto economic way, where the sort of settlement is all decentralize, the sort of physical routing of packets is completely decentralized. Unknown Speaker 29:03 And there's an incentive for people to start the network in the absence of traffic initially, right? Like we're not, we're not going to pretend that there's very little traffic that started these networks, there's not right, and you have to sort of create an incentive for people to build the network before it exists. And in some ways, the cell the cell networks were lucky in the way that they ended up where they ended up. And there's that famous McKinsey report that at&t Commission's like it's probably the 90s I don't know if you saw this, but they asked McKinsey to report to them, what they believe the total size of the cellular network audience would be in in in the country, like how many subscribers would there be, and this is probably the mid mid to late 90s. And McKinsey came back and said that it was in the order of like 900,000 people was the maximum was the maximum addressable market, right and so no one knew what the fuck they were doing. Right? It was it was it was sort of dumb luck that they built this network to some degree and then honestly that Apple launched the iPhone like blew it in. Unknown Speaker 30:00 For the, you know, into orbit, Unknown Speaker 30:03 but again, you know, it's hard to do some of this stuff, and I think it's gonna get harder. Like I said, the 5g range is really, really bad, you know, like, millimeter wave 5g. So that's like the real high bandwidth stuff. So when people talk about low latency, gaming and self driving cars, and like 4k video streaming, they're talking about the millimeter wave version of 5g. And, you know, those, those frequencies are interfered with by like humidity. You know, like, if it's humid one day, like, you're not going to receive anything, and glass certainly is out of the question. Yes, the software is that this operates at what? 60 gigahertz, right? So for people who aren't that familiar with radios, the higher the frequency, it starts, at some point, it just basically becomes impossible to even get through like a brick wall. Yeah, it is, I mean, with Unknown Speaker 30:49 the stuff that we do is in the 900 megahertz and below in some countries. And that tends to make like those radio waves, the longer they tend to, like, you know, penetrate things better, like brick and trees, and, Unknown Speaker 31:02 and they reflect better and stuff that's in high frequency has much higher bandwidth, right? So you can actually stream 4k video in those high frequencies in the 10s, of gigahertz. But you really need like a direct line of sight to the thing, you know, we need, we need that line of sight to the base station, basically, right? It's not going to go around a corner, it's not going to go through a wall, it's not going to go through a window. Unknown Speaker 31:23 And so those, you know, we're gonna see a big shift there as people try and deploy 5g, real 5g networks. And you know, what to expect to happen is sort of what at&t is now doing, where they're starting to lie about what 5g is the same way they lied about what 4g was. Unknown Speaker 31:39 And so like, now on my iPhone, I have like 5g II in the corner of my of my iPhone, I don't know, 5g is not a thing that exists. Right? You just made that up. But but it's, it's easier for them to just make it up then to actually deploy 5g network. So Unknown Speaker 31:54 yeah, it's gonna be that'd be fun to watch. Yeah, it's an interesting distinction between what the carriers are sort of pitching and what the reality is, especially when it comes to IoT devices. I mean, if we're talking about an IoT future where there are, you know, smart streetlights and sensors everywhere, as you said, to, you know, record air pollution, which is something I really care about. And to record, you know, parking spots, these devices need to be insanely small, have basically infinite battery life, right be able to last years on a coin cell battery, and be able to reach really long distances to the nearest gateway or hotspot. And the reality of 5g, especially at 60 gigahertz is just like, so completely opposite of what these devices actually need. And even cellular, I mean, cellular networks, I believe, you know, devices that connect to them use like, maybe over 100 times more power than you would want for an IoT device. So really, what's unique about lorwyn, which is what the helium network uses, is that it's an extremely low power wireless network. And there's just nothing out there that exists like this, which is I guess, why do you guys are doing this? Unknown Speaker 33:10 Yeah, I think there's been the carriers have been using IoT as like fuel for 5g, which I think is interesting like that there. Unknown Speaker 33:19 Maybe it's disingenuous, also, like, it's not really the case, right? Like, at least for this low power stuff. And I think that's the other thing that's happened over time is that the definition of it has shifted, it used to be these low power things. And now people include, like, you know, a Tesla is as an IoT device, right? And I think, maybe that's fine. It's just different, you know, like at the start of all of this, and, you know, 2012, or 11, whenever I first heard the term IoT, I don't think people met, you know, cars, but back then. Unknown Speaker 33:47 Maybe I'm wrong about that, again, till but the 5g stuff is certainly not targeted on low power things, right? It's going to be extraordinarily power consumptive. Unknown Speaker 33:58 Because moving massive amounts of data at high speed just takes a little power. Like it's sort of that simple. And the devices are on, you know, for longer when they're streaming video. And the protocols are much more complicated, because we've seen this with NB IoT as an example. So NB IoT is a cellular protocol designed for low power things. Right. And so this was a 3g pp standard. That's the sort of governing body that that is responsible for LTE and one of the other cellular protocols. And the idea with MBO T was that you would have sort of a Laura when competitive. I honestly believe that Laura Ladd was a big driver for them doing this. But it would be a competitive technology that the telcos would be able to add alongside LTE, right? So it's part of the LTE family. A lot of those cellular base stations are Software Defined radios, so it would be a software upgrade rather than a hardware upgrade. And it hasn't really materialized and part of the reason why is you know, it's complicated to build wireless protocols that have to Unknown Speaker 35:00 To be very smart, you know, like, for example, in NB IoT, it often operates in the same spectrum as LTE. And so it has to sort of dodge around, you know, high bandwidth traffic. And that means that the protocol has to be smarter, it means the devices have to be more complicated, the program has to be more complicated. There are other versions of NB IoT, where they operate in what they call these guard bands, which is, you know, sort of gaps between the LTE spectrum, which should be quiet. But again, it's like, you know, once you start bifurcating and beauty into like, sort of two different things, then you lose some of the economies of scale, and you lose, you know, some of the ubiquity of the idea. So maybe it hasn't really caught on, I don't think the battery life was anywhere close to what they were claiming, like, I remember reading, like 25 years of battery life, or something and some laughing. Unknown Speaker 35:47 And that hasn't materialized. And so we sort of still back to where we started, right. And even if even if it did materialize, it's not clear that the economic model would, would really be correct in the first place. And so we've certainly seen a lot of companies and customers that we've talked to, who have experimented with NB IoT, and found it unacceptable for various reasons, whether it was the cost of the hardware, or the customer service, or the battery life, or you know, it's a combination of all three. And then the X Factor there is that you have to like certify all these devices with the carriers. And if anyone's ever gone through that process, I can confirm that that is an awful process. Unknown Speaker 36:24 And so again, like having this sort of decentralized registration certification system that's sort of built into helium is also a super interesting thing. Because it, it makes it easier for companies to just get stuff up and running and not have to go through this sort of very, very heavy, costly sort of time consuming process. That's really interesting. So getting back on track here, you were talking about, you know, bootstrapping the network, and someone has to build the initial prototype and everything right? That big telcos one invest in it, because it's just simply not enough immediate revenue, right? For the amount of investment they'd have to make. And yet, as of today, your company has raised a series C with total funding amount of over $54 million. So clearly, you've got some investors to believe in this vision, and you've got some real money behind it to sort of kick this off. And your latest round includes a surprising amount of what I would essentially call household names in the tech investment community, hooting Google Ventures, Khosla ventures, unit square ventures for smart SV Angel, I've actually never come across another blockchain company where I recognize so many investor names. So what I want to know is how did investors react to your pitch at each stage of your funding to get easier, or harder as you sort of transitioned from this very straightforward idea to this sort of crypto economic model? Unknown Speaker 37:50 So in the early days, you know, fundraising was, was that very different? You know, instead of the seed round, Unknown Speaker 37:58 the back end and 13, maybe even 12, like when we were starting this, there wasn't any, like Laura, when didn't even exist, right? CIG Fox was sort of a thing didn't really exist. So the whole notion of building a low power network was very novel, right? in that in that day, right? Like today, there's like, yeah, like SIG Fox, or it's like Senate. It's like machine q or it's, you know, it's like NB IoT. But that back then it wasn't true. Like, yeah, the whole notion of like, let's build this low power wireless network was very novel. So, Unknown Speaker 38:27 you know, investors at that time, it was a much different conversation. But I think everyone realized the sort of problem space that we were tackling, which was that, you know, we were supposed to have all these things, even in 2013, this was true. And we still don't have all these things. And we think a big reason why we don't have them. And when I'm talking about things, I mean, like the kind of sensors that we're describing, Unknown Speaker 38:50 the big we think a big part of the reason why they don't exist is that there's no infrastructure there to use them, right? Like, you're not going to build a, you know, radiation monitoring sensor. If you can't, if you notice, there's no network to use it on. Right, like it would be, it would be pointless. So that was, you know, in the early days, that pitch, I think resonated with, with everyone in our series A was led by Coastal ventures of like the no coseley himself. Unknown Speaker 39:16 You know, he think he certainly believed in that, in that vision, I think there's still a lot of questions at that time about how we would take it to market and like how we would actually make it work as a business. And we still haven't figured that out. Unknown Speaker 39:28 But that was certainly the vision, right? Is that like, there should be a network like this. And if you you know, if you built it, there must be like billions of applications that take advantage of it. In the series B round which Google Ventures LED, you know, we were in a slightly when the sort of a middle of a half pivot, right like that was when we were talking about Unknown Speaker 39:49 let's go after some of these vertical applications. So we still don't want to lose the original vision. Like we still want this like broad platform that we think other things can can build on top of it, but we also think we should be Transcribed by https://otter.ai