Kyle Malady - CTO of Verizon

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. All the great topics we talk about on the show—mastering craft, communication, team structure, scaling, time management, strategy—all of these items are great to hear about. But unless you practice them, you fail to gain the experience. You can listen to people talk about doing push-ups every week, but you only gain the muscle and improve when you do them. I've taken all the topics we discussed and made short video challenges out of them so you can take action each week with the skills of the greatest technology leaders on Earth.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:33) Build up your leadership muscles bit by bit over time. For a free trial, visit leaderbits.io. Get ready for 5G leadership. Today, we are talking to Kyle, the CTO of Verizon, and we discuss what it takes to motivate your team, Verizon's push to deploy 5G, and how they are using machine learning and predictive analytics to enhance the customer experience. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast.

(Kyle Malady at 00:01:05) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:06) This is the Modern CTO podcast. We will try. I did put a couple fun questions, and I was really excited to talk with you. I'm actually a Verizon customer.

(Kyle Malady at 00:01:22) Thank you very much.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:23) Yes. Appreciate that. I had switched away, right? And then the cell phone coverage was no good, so I came back.

(Kyle Malady at 00:01:33) All right. Good. That's what we like to hear. Yeah. Even though I hadn't had an experience since you came back, that's perfect. Now where do you live? In Florida?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:41) Yeah. I'm in Sarasota, Florida, and it just so happens that the 15-mile radius around my house, the only carrier that's good is Verizon.

(Kyle Malady at 00:01:51) Awesome. So you don't even have Fios or anything like that. Right? You just use this for...

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:58) I think I have you at my business. I think we're on Verizon right now for the business. But for my home, no. Your fiber lines aren't out there.

(Kyle Malady at 00:02:07) We sold a couple markets that we had down in Florida for Fios. We sold a few years ago. So, fun. That's it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:14) Get this. So Frontier buys it, right? And then it's April Fool's Day when the transition happened, and one of the main lines in our whole town got cut. So all of Tampa, the whole city of Tampa was out of Internet for six hours on April Fool's Day.

(Kyle Malady at 00:02:28) Oh, really?

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:29) And I thought everybody was messing with me when I got to the office. It was really...

(Kyle Malady at 00:02:33) Oh, boy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:35) Yeah. So what does your morning look like? What's your morning routine look like?

(Kyle Malady at 00:02:40) You know, generally, I get in probably 7:00 in the morning, and my first thing is just look at what I have planned for the day, and then I typically go through emails and stuff for about an hour, and then I just get into the meetings. So, typically, I try and do my emails before I get into the day, and then I'll do them again at night. Because, you know, they build up on you. I remember one time my daughter asked me what I do for a living, and I told her emails. So you have to be careful. You can get stuck in email hell if you're not careful. Right? So I just put time aside for the day to do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:24) How old's your daughter?

(Kyle Malady at 00:03:25) Oh, well, I have two. I have one that's 17 and one that's 15. Hopefully, they're going to be—you know, we'll see. Hopefully, they're going to be engineers. They're studying science and math and actually coding in high school. So we'll see if we can get them down the engineering track. Both my wife and myself are trained engineers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:48) Oh, amazing. Yeah. My father is...

(Kyle Malady at 00:03:51) The base.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:51) Yeah. You know, I have an 11-month-old baby girl.

(Kyle Malady at 00:03:56) Oh, congratulations.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:57) Yeah. So actually my family has a foundation, and we do children's books for charity. One of the books we have is called The Princess Physicist.

(Kyle Malady at 00:04:06) Oh, cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:07) Yeah. And it's a princess who gets stuck in a tower. But instead of a guy coming to save her, she finds a book about physics under the bed and uses physics to get herself out.

(Kyle Malady at 00:04:14) That's fantastic. Where can I get that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:17) I'll send you a copy.

(Kyle Malady at 00:04:18) Oh, that'd be awesome, man. I'd love to get that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:19) Yeah. It's one of the children's board books. I thought it'd be cool to be able to read my kid books that we had made.

(Kyle Malady at 00:04:26) Oh, wow. And I really like the story too. That's fantastic. Yeah. Nobody comes and saves her. She uses physics to figure a way out of that. That's awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:35) That's what my daughter would do. So I was like, I gotta make a book for her.

(Kyle Malady at 00:04:38) Awesome. Appreciate that. That's cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:40) So I was talking to Kevin Scott, who's the CTO of Microsoft. He is a fantastic human. If you ever get the chance to meet him, just really cool guy. And he was talking to me about all the different great things that they're doing with the Intelligent Edge. And so I noticed everybody's bringing up the Intelligent Edge. I can't get away from it. I want to know what you think of it and how is it on your radar?

(Kyle Malady at 00:05:02) Yeah. You know, it's something—it's kind of a term we gave to our overall strategy of really upgrading our networks so we can build what we call kind of a multipurpose network. If you look at our history, a lot of our networks were built for each business unit, if you will. Right? So the wireless business unit, we built a wireless network that optimized that. If you look at the Fios network, there was a whole set of other engineers building networks to optimize our Fios offering. Same thing if you look at our enterprise business. We had other engineers doing that. So, you know, that was fine, but now the technology has advanced to a point that we can really streamline our networks, make them much simpler, make them flatter, make them easier to operate, and really set ourselves up for future technologies. So why we call it Intelligent Edge, really, in our world, it's a lot of different technologies coming together. It's something we call unified transport. So different—we have a couple different partners that work with us on the transport piece. We're working with Cisco and Juniper and others on some really advanced routers. And it all starts with fiber. Right? So we're putting a lot of money into fiber. So you take those three things, and then you add in 5G and what we call mobile edge compute, which we think is going to be a big deal in the coming years. You add that all together, and you build a really flexible, easy, advanced network that has a lot of intelligence in it, and can do really good—we think—really groundbreaking things in the near future. So, you know, it's kind of the bedrock of what we're trying to build around here these days.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:53) That's amazing. I'm curious. We get a lot of questions from the audience that they want us to ask you, and so I go through all of them and pick a few ones that are interesting. And one guy named Hal, he asked about quantum entangled communications. And I—yeah. Right? I know. I was like, this will be a good one. So I'm not going to quiz you on the physics of quantum entangled communications. But the question I extracted from his question was I would like a little insight and you to speak a little bit about how stuff goes from the lab to our hands. And the commercialization process, how long does that generally take? And, yeah, just a few thoughts on that.

(Kyle Malady at 00:07:35) Yeah. No. So it's interesting. I don't know much about that quantum computing stuff and networking. I have seen some demos. It seems really cool, but it also seems like they needed to do it in an ultra cold, you know...

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:48) A lab? Yeah. Exactly. So it works in the lab. I promise.

(Kyle Malady at 00:07:53) If it's really, really cold. But, you know, who knows? There's a lot of smart people working on it. We'll maybe we'll see something there. But, generally, it depends on the technology. So if I take something like 4G or 5G, that's driven a lot by standards bodies and a lot of engineers and technical people working together to come up with standards, decide how things are going to work. And typically, vendors, they will take those specs. They'll build chip sets, software, gear, and then we'll typically go and put that in our labs. We'll run it through the paces. You know, typically iterate on that a little bit, and then it's ready for prime time. We'll do some FOAs, which is first office application. We'll test it in the field, and then at some point, we'll say it's ready for prime time. We'll start deploying and then sell them to customers. So that's generally if you're talking something like 4G or 5G—because the reason it needs to be like that is because all of these systems need to work together. So, you know, people need to be able to take a, say, for instance, a cell phone from United States and go to Europe, and it needs to work. So the standard-setting process is very important. Now there's other things we do for coming up with a new product or service, and that's a little different. Because in that area, you know, really, what we're trying to do is come up with interesting services for our customers, whether it be consumer or enterprise, what have you. And, typically, what we try and do is we look at what is the groundbreaking tech that's out there, and then we try and figure out how—you know, is this some kind of tech that we can use in-house, and integrate it with some other things we have, and apply technology to solve issues for our customers. So kind of two different models for how we develop new things. And they have different timelines too, obviously.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:47) That's very insightful. I'm curious to know—you mentioned email, but if you were to—obviously, you're the CTO of a very large organization. Right? And so all the mid-level CTOs, maybe they're teams of 500, 5,000, they're all curious about the pie chart. Like, if you were to chunk your day into three pie slices, what would they be? How would that look?

(Kyle Malady at 00:10:11) You know, it's interesting. Actually, I do do that. And what I do is at the beginning of every month, I set out—well, actually, I do it every 90 days. I set out what I want to get done in the next 90 days, and then I write down the four or five things that I want to spend my time on. And I actually decide—it's a pie chart, and I decide how much of my time on each one I want to spend. And then I actually go at the end of every week, and I look to see if I did that or not. And what that does is it helps me stay focused. Obviously, in an organization this large, there's so many things going on. I can easily get distracted and not major on the majors as our chairman says. And so I make sure that I actually quantitatively sit down, write it down, think about it, and execute on that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:00) Who is it that you mentioned?

(Kyle Malady at 00:11:02) Our CEO, Lowell McAdams. He always says something—he always has a term about majoring on the majors. And really, you know...

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:07) Don't want to major on the minors.

(Kyle Malady at 00:11:09) Don't major on the minors. Right? And that's, you know, it gets more crucial that you do that as you kind of move up the chain of command. And, you know, hey. Listen. There's sometimes there's things that are really cool that I like to spend my time on, but it's not what I'm paid to do. So, you know, I gotta make sure I stay focused.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:27) That's incredibly important. The focus is the determining difference between the people who achieve the success and they don't. You mentioned you're at the top, so you've had to work your way there. Nobody just arrives at the top, and it's just magical. I'm curious to know a little bit about your path, how you got started in technology, and then how you leveled up to where you are today.

(Kyle Malady at 00:11:47) Sure. So I—I mean, it's kind of a long story, but just in a nutshell, I have a degree in mechanical engineering just because that's what interested me the most. And then when I was getting ready to graduate, I was looking at different—and I think it's important to look, you know, where do you want to go work? And, you know, the mobile phones were just coming onto the scene, and, you know, it looked like a really cool technology that had some legs and was interesting. So I hopped from, you know, kind of mechanical engineering, what one would think a mechanical engineer might do, and I hopped over into, basically, more of an electrical engineering type scenario. And I was hired by NYNEX Mobile as a cell site technician in the late '80s. And, you know, I took care of cell sites. And at the time, it was brand new technology. You know, I got to work with really smart people at Bell Laboratories. When I started, I think we had 75 cell sites. You know, today, we have tens of thousands, 70,000. So I learned right hands-on experience from day one being a cell site tech. And then as time went on, I got to get involved in other different kind of technologies in, you know, kind of crypto and security, designing new technologies. I've been around for all of the Gs as they say. So 1G, 2G, 3G, 5G. So I've been here for all the Gs, and I've seen the whole industry grow from, you know, from really its early days. I've been very lucky, and the company has, I tell you, done a good job. They're very thoughtful about how they, you know, keep increasing your skills and see, you know, what you can handle. And I've been very lucky that I've been given a lot of different jobs where I've been able to learn from, you know, technology development, engineering, construction, you know, finance, business development, products, networks. So I just had a great ride, and, you know, I'm fortunate and humbled that, you know, the company has thought enough of my skills and abilities to allow me to run this great organization.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:02) Oh, man. I'm getting all pumped up here. I geek out over technology and leadership. I'm like, tell me about that path. What was—tell me about the first time that you got the opportunity to lead a team and how it didn't work out. No. But, like, what you learned—yeah. Well, the trend here is that it virtually never does. You get your experience, you know, but you get it as a leader. So I'm curious to know how far were you in your career when you got your first chance to lead a team, and what's the one lesson that still sticks in your mind from then?

(Kyle Malady at 00:14:38) Yeah. I was very lucky since we were, you know, I was in this thing very early on. The wireless company that I was at, NYNEX Mobile, was relatively small. So, frankly, I started managing a team probably when I was like 23. 23 or 24. You know, frankly, had no experience at all, but that's how you learned. It wasn't a big team. It was a team of maybe 10 folks. But ever since then, I've had—I've had, you know, ever increasing, you know, sometimes larger teams, sometimes smaller teams. Each one is different depending on, you know, what you're trying to accomplish.

(Kyle Malady at 00:15:18) I've led teams that are kind of more operations oriented. That's, you know, they tend to, you know, you manage that a little differently than, say, I'm managing a whole bunch of, a group of people who are doing technology development and really into the bits and the bytes of the tech. Right? There's kind of different methods to manage those teams. But, you know, it's really just a learning experience.

(Kyle Malady at 00:15:44) You've gotta hop into the pool and, you know, work with people. You've gotta figure out what motivates folks, get everybody lined up and charge them in the same direction. That's the key.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:55) Now, so when you were learning, did you just sort of surround yourself with some great people who knew more than you, or did you with some, like, certain books or different leaders that you learned from, like, their, you know, books or audio programs, whatever it may be. Like, where did you pull your resources to upskill yourself in those areas?

(Kyle Malady at 00:16:16) You know, I think it's basically experiential. I've been very lucky. I've had some great bosses, and I've learned something, you know, from each and every one of them. And, you know, I really think it's experience. Sure, you know, you read papers. You know, I went to business school, so you read some academic stuff about it and, you know, you read HBR or whatever. But it's really about you've gotta deal with people one on one, and you've gotta be able to motivate folks, and you've gotta be able to come up with a vision that people believe in. You have to sell it, and you have to treat people fairly. I'm a big believer in, you know, you set goals for folks, and you ask them to go to a certain place, and then innovation happens, and good folks come up with new ways of doing things, and you embrace that as opposed to, you know, sitting on top of folks and micromanaging people. That never, I learned that really early on, that doesn't really do anything.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:18) Yes. That—

(Kyle Malady at 00:17:19) Makes it worse. Really what it's just really experiencing and gaining knowledge over the years on what works and what doesn't.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:26) Yeah. So paying attention to, you know, what other bosses and leaders are doing around you, and then taking what you like or don't like from each person and kind of blending it into your own.

(Kyle Malady at 00:17:34) And burning my own style. Right, man? It just, you know? It's funny. We have some interns here, and I was talking to them yesterday, and they were asking about leadership. And I'm like, you know, you've gotta be you. Right? Just do you, and don't try and be anything that's not, you know, it's kind of fake because people see right through that. Just be your own person and do you, and then maximize you, and everything will be okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:59) And then get more experience.

(Kyle Malady at 00:18:00) Absolutely. And it goes back to getting, you know, I've been very lucky. Just keep trying to find different experiences that you can learn from. You know, right now, this is great for me. I'm learning so much in this role. It's fantastic. And I always ask people, just always be inquisitive, keep learning. That's the kind of people I want here. I want people who are inquisitive. They want to learn new things. They want to upskill. They want to learn new technologies and see how they can apply them to our business to help our customers. And that's, you know? You surround yourself with good people like that, good things are gonna happen.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:32) Lots of innovation, like you mentioned. So I was speaking with one of my brother's friends. He runs one of the larger EMT slash fire counties in the United States. Yeah. Like down in Collier County down in Florida.

(Kyle Malady at 00:18:46) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:46) And for some reason, they're just exceptionally large. And he was showing me some of the really cool predictive analytics that they could do about when emergencies would happen. He's like, look, we know that this many calls is going to come from this area on these types of days. And I was just blown away by what they were able to do with the amount of data that they have of, you know, managing emergencies in that geographical region for x amount of time. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:10) And so you guys have incredible amounts of data, right, about just everything. And so you must have tremendous capabilities to do some amazing things with machine learning and predictive analytics. I'm curious what's going on on that front.

(Kyle Malady at 00:19:25) Actually, it's one of the areas that I'm most excited about now, because here's an area where you talk about the intelligent edge network. This is an area that I'm really, you know, I'm super excited about because we can really change the way we do things. And we started on this journey probably five, six years ago. And if you know anything about telecom, they're, you know, typically carriers have these things called NOCs, and it's really a network operation center. And, you know, for the last hundred years, really what those things are is they're places where our technicians sit and alarms come in. So all of the millions of different devices that we have out in our network, you know, sometimes cards fail, boxes fail, things fail. And, generally, what happens is an alarm comes in, and then we'd send somebody out to fix it. You know, not very exciting in this day and age. So what we're trying to do is change that. So instead of alarms coming in, we are trying to characterize at very deep levels how the network works and how they function, and how different events in one part of the network, we can correlate it and understand what an outcome might be somewhere else. And, you know, one area that I like to talk about is we're getting very good at predicting failures, almost like you're saying. We're getting good at predicting cards failing before they actually fail. So you go back ten years, you know, the card would fail, alarm would come, we'd send somebody out to fix it. Now we can gauge with very good precision, like 99%, when a certain card may fail, you know, within a week or two's time. And that really is helpful for our customers because we can change that card out before it fails and anybody sees any impact. Right? So it's those kind of things that, you know, and once again, it's our people. They're upskilling themselves to learn the new tech and how to apply it and make our network work better. So that's really, you know, I'm super excited about that. It's early days of this. We are skilling up there. We're hiring folks in that area. We're setting up a framework to really be able to leverage it across the whole company, not just in network. So, you know, it's really, it's an exciting time from that perspective.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:42) Yes. I'm very excited because I was just talking about this last week with Dennis. He is the senior vice president of Canon, you know, like the, they do cameras, imaging.

(Kyle Malady at 00:21:53) Yep. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:53) And they do an incredible amount with imaging and networks and infrastructure, and he's actually only about an hour from you physically. And he's a great guy, like, super cool. You'd get along with him. You should definitely meet him. And he was telling me about this big push that they're doing now so they can actually proactively swap out different pieces of equipment, and they're getting it to the point where they're calling you up to say, hey, this is going to break. In two weeks, we're gonna come out there and replace it.

(Kyle Malady at 00:22:23) Right. Yeah. Same idea. Same idea.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:26) I love it.

(Kyle Malady at 00:22:26) And he's probably working on, you know, what's cool about, he's working, you bring up imaging, you know, that is a great use case for the intelligent edge network, because there's a lot of work going on in the world about, you know, image recognition and, you know, manipulation and using video to do advanced things. Right? Especially in smart city applications. Yeah. And that's really where the intelligent edge network comes in with 5G. So as we're deploying 5G, we have super great latency characteristics with 5G, and we have some mobile edge compute there. Guys like, you know, the fellow you know at Canon and people who are doing a lot of advanced imagery stuff. This will really give them a leg up and really move the whole science forward.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:16) Yeah. It's amazing how life works and how these great companies are doing these things in these similar spaces but differently. And, yeah, I love it. And just so much brilliance. Also, like, the CTO of Williams-Sonoma, they acquired, you know, they're like the kitchen company.

(Kyle Malady at 00:23:31) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I buy stuff from them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:33) Oh, yeah. They're awesome. Okay. Their, Yasir or Yasser, he's the CTO over there. They also own Pottery Barn, which was news to me, but they acquired, because they're making, you know, everybody wants to do the AR stuff with the cameras. And so they acquired this, like, 100 person AR company and used them, pulled them into their company, and then digitized all their products. So now in the near future, I don't know if it's publicly available yet, you're just gonna be, your wife's gonna be able to spend money without leaving the kitchen more so than on Amazon. You can see what it looks like.

(Kyle Malady at 00:24:06) Yeah. No. That's what we're betting on. Part of this, what we're building these networks for is, you know, I believe AR and VR are gonna be, you know, it's gonna change the way people do things. It's gonna be a whole new platform, and we're early days of that too. But to do any mixed reality, virtual reality, augmented reality, to do it well, you need to have the latency characteristics that you would get with 5G. Right? On 4G, the, 4G is a fantastic technology. People love it. But for doing any kind of application that's really latency sensitive, we need something a little more advanced, and that's where 5G is gonna come in. We'll get down to single digit millisecond latencies with 5G. So it'll make AR/VR unbelievable. And since it's wireless, you'll be able to move around. Right? You won't have to have, you've probably seen a lot of these AR/VR demonstrations where people are wearing a, you know, an Alienware computer on their back.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:15) But that's why we—

(Kyle Malady at 00:25:15) We'd like to build a network and a platform that allows people to maybe you just need your goggles on. You don't need to have all the other ancillary gear with you to get a great experience.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:25) Right. I'm looking forward to the day where we no longer have the web in the sense that the wires need to go around and be drilled, like, when we could just get it from the satellites.

(Kyle Malady at 00:25:35) Well, or the wireless network. How's that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:37) Yeah. The wireless network. Well, I mean, you guys see Elon Musk and those companies putting the clusters up there, like, the micro satellites, and we're just gonna get more of that. Right?

(Kyle Malady at 00:25:48) There's a lot of companies looking at, there's a few different ones that I know of that are looking at, you know, doing some kind of wireless data over either balloons or satellites or low earth orbit satellites, etcetera. And I, you know, there's probably use cases for that. But for us, we're really focused on our, you know, traditional having antennas on the ground and connecting them with fiber and the intelligent edge network. So that's where we're putting our bet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:20) So that's important right now?

(Kyle Malady at 00:26:22) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:22) That's like what, alright. Good. See, I come talk to you, so you tell me.

(Kyle Malady at 00:26:26) Yeah. No. That's exactly right. So that's what we're spending a lot of our time putting out the infrastructure for 5G. We announced we're gonna do some fixed wireless trials this year. We announced three cities that we're gonna do it in. The last one we just announced was Houston. So we're out there right now putting in the fiber and the antennas that allow us to start selling that to customers, and we'll be doing that this year.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:51) What? That's amazing.

(Kyle Malady at 00:26:53) Yeah. Good. That—

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:54) I'm, like, pumped up because, you know, I've been watching on these videos of, like, I think a couple car companies did some videos of what would be possible with 5G.

(Kyle Malady at 00:27:05) Essentially, the real time style communication, and I saw a couple of them, and I was like, whoa. So that brings up the question, we, you just answered, about Houston's getting it. When will 5G be commonly available in the United States?

(Kyle Malady at 00:27:17) Well, next year, we've, you know, we will be deploying the technology. We're deploying it this year, but we're really gonna gain speed next year, and you'll start seeing a lot of these services in 2019. So next year, you'll start seeing it. We're already working. However, we're not waiting until the thing's deployed. We're out working with a lot of our partners in the tech world to come up with what are the interesting things that consumers would like and enterprises would like to use the platform for. So we're out there developing it right now. We're working with a lot of the thought leaders in the tech world. So when the platform is out there and ready to be used, there'll be useful applications that can operate on top right away. So a lot of work going on there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:01) Are there 5G phones out for purchase now?

(Kyle Malady at 00:28:04) Well, actually, we did, we announced last week that there is a 5G capable device, a Motorola device, and I think we made that announcement a few days ago, last Thursday. Right. So that's gonna be the first 5G capable device. When the chipsets are ready, there'll be a mod that goes right onto the phone, so then you'll be able to use 5G right away. And then we have a host of other, you know, developments and stuff we're working with our partners on right now. So when the network's ready, we will have the devices ready as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:42) I'm excited. Yeah. I'm like, that thumbs up. Like, are you guys ahead of your competition? Is anyone ahead of you? Are you right in line with someone? Like, are you leading the pack?

(Kyle Malady at 00:28:51) No. I think, you know, we're leading the pack. We've had a tradition of doing this. You know, we were the first to push LTE. We were out there first with that. We were driving the industry to go to LTE, and the same can be said for 5G. We've been out leading the pack on this one. We will be first to the market, and we not only will be first, we'll be best. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:15) Well, do you know, honestly, so I really, like, I paid the extra money because the network works good, and I like the quality, but also I find it, like, shopping, like, Target versus Walmart. It's just a nicer experience. Like, I just want, I wanna go to the higher end. Like, I know it's a little bit more, but it's a better experience. It's easier on me. I don't have to worry about it. Nothing, no Verizon junk is ever gonna hit my to-do list. The bill gets paid. The thing works.

(Kyle Malady at 00:29:42) I appreciate that. I appreciate you being a customer, and I appreciate you being an ambassador for us. That's fantastic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:47) Yeah. Were there any other topics that you wanted to touch on that you're really excited about? I know you said you're very excited about the predictive analytics. We talked about 5G. Everyone's really pumped about that. Anything else?

(Kyle Malady at 00:30:00) Yeah, no, I think those are the—you know, when we talked about before about how I spend my time, the things we just touched on are really how I'm spending my time. The only other thing I'll probably leave you with is, you know, 4G is still what we're spending most of our time on, our resources and our money, to continue to advance 4G.

(Kyle Malady at 00:30:22) Just because 5G is coming doesn't mean 4G is going away anytime soon. It's fundamental to what we do, and we have a lot of new technologies going on there, like something called carrier aggregation, so we can have different frequencies. You can kind of bond them together to get faster speeds. Something called MIMO, 4x4 MIMO. We have multiple antennas in the device and in the network, and something called 256 QAM.

(Kyle Malady at 00:30:49) So anyway, these are just kind of techniques and technologies that we are putting in our LTE Advanced footprint throughout the country. So your service should continue to improve as we put these things into the network.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:05) So these technologies are ways that you're actually enhancing the current 4G network?

(Kyle Malady at 00:31:08) You betcha. And we're spending a lot of time—our engineers spend a lot of time on deploying these technologies and these optimizations, and our customers will start benefiting from them here. So we continue to spend a lot of time making sure our network is the best network in the country.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:26) So going from four to five, that's like one, right? But how much of an improvement is it really?

(Kyle Malady at 00:31:33) It adds a lot more capacity to the network, which means you're going to always get a consistent and good experience. And how we know this is because we do a lot of testing of our network. There's a lot of various different ways you can test your network. One way is we do something called drive testing. A company called RootMetrics does a lot of—they send vehicles out into the world and drive the different networks, and they compare against each other.

(Kyle Malady at 00:32:03) And in all the studies that you see, we always show—you know, all these independent studies show we have the best networks. And we're going to keep doing that, and we're going to keep applying technologies to our already incredible network that make it even better and keep us in the lead. So that's what we spend our time on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:21) Are you a fan of Elon Musk?

(Kyle Malady at 00:32:24) You know, I don't read much about him. I think it's pretty cool what he's done with these cars, what he's doing to the car industry. I mean, seems—

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:34) Like the rockets.

(Kyle Malady at 00:32:35) Yeah, the rocket seems cool, but there's a bunch of people doing that too. So I mean, I'm a fan, I guess, but I don't know. I don't follow him too much.

(Kyle Malady at 00:32:44) I've got to be honest with you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:45) There's him, there's Branson—you know, Richard Branson—and then there's Bezos.

(Kyle Malady at 00:32:50) Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:51) It's all the billionaires doing the rockets.

(Kyle Malady at 00:32:53) They're all doing rockets.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:54) Yeah. So I bought all their biographies, their life stories, right?

(Kyle Malady at 00:32:58) Uh-huh.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:59) And I read them all, and then I'm like, this is the path to the billionaire rocket club.

(Kyle Malady at 00:33:04) Okay. Well, good luck.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:06) So I want to bring—

(Kyle Malady at 00:33:07) I can tell you, we're not going to be doing that. I don't think we're going to be shooting rockets here at Verizon.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:12) No, but here's a question for 5G, right? Because it might be able to help, right? Because they have to communicate, right? And so we might be able to help Elon and all them. He wants to go to Mars, right? If he offered you a ticket, would you go?

(Kyle Malady at 00:33:26) If he offered me a ticket, would I go? You know what? I don't think so, because I think it would take me far too long to get to Mars, and I'm not sure what the return ticket looks like.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:33) Right. And it's dusty, right?

(Kyle Malady at 00:33:36) I think I'm staying here, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:41) Well, so I was talking—we have the CTO of SpaceX coming on, right? So I'm really—and then we had, you know, Roomba. They like iRobot. They make little robots.

(Kyle Malady at 00:33:51) So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:51) I said, all right, well, I'll bring you guys value because we'll do a special mission. Because Mars is so dusty, we'll get Verizon involved. We'll build an army of Roombas, and we'll send them on a ship ahead of time to clean up Mars.

(Kyle Malady at 00:34:01) That sounds like a good use case.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:03) Yeah. And then you guys can, you know, coordinate the digital connection, and that's something—5G, the 5G Roomba army.

(Kyle Malady at 00:34:09) Count us in. There you go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:13) And Canon will take pictures of it.

(Kyle Malady at 00:34:14) There you go. There you go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:16) Oh, man. Kyle, man, this has been so much fun. I really enjoyed it. Thank you so much for coming on the show and hanging out.

(Kyle Malady at 00:34:22) Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:23) Yeah. And we'll just loop back and give you the air date and all the quick clips and all the good stuff that comes along with the show, and just thank you again for your time.

(Kyle Malady at 00:34:33) Yeah. I appreciate what you're doing, man. It's pretty cool. I went on to your site, and I listened to some of the stuff. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:37) Oh, nice.

(Kyle Malady at 00:34:38) It's a pretty cool thing. So I appreciate your time as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:41) Yeah. And you're in New Jersey?

(Kyle Malady at 00:34:43) I'm in New Jersey.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:44) Awesome. So I'll probably be, like, in three months, I'll be up around that area. So maybe I'll stop by and get a high five and say hello.

(Kyle Malady at 00:34:49) Contact Howie. Yeah. That'd be cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:51) All right, man. Have a great day.

(Kyle Malady at 00:34:53) All right. You too. Cheers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:54) See you. Thank you so much for listening to the Modern CTO podcast. Share this. Get the word out. Thank you guys so much.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:05) I couldn't do it without you. I appreciate it. You guys are the absolute best.