Manish Tiwari, SVP at Cradlepoint - Empowering Enterprises With Private Cellular Networks

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:03) Hello, my friends. Today we're talking to Manish, the SVP of Corporate Development and Strategy at Cradlepoint. And we discuss the benefits of establishing a private cellular network for enterprise network connections, why it's important to accept the fluidity of culture at a company, and how to establish yourself as a leader when joining a new organization. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Manish at 00:00:33) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:34) This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Manish at 00:00:45) I did my undergraduate in computer science in India from an institute called Indian Institute of Technology. And when I was finishing up my undergrad, in terms of options available to us at that time, we could have taken a full-time role at a technology company after that degree, or I was fortunate enough to have an option to apply for advanced studies and got a scholarship from a university in the United States. I came here to Purdue University, did my master's in computer science. And again, during that master's, got into wireless technologies, did some research work at Nokia Research through an internship.

(Manish at 00:01:27) And that's how I got into the networking industry. After finishing up that degree, I had the option to join Nokia back again, but I wanted to be at a smaller company. And there was a company called Juniper Networks, which used to be a startup at that time, which was sort of challenging Cisco, was a newer company, and they were at the forefront of the routing technologies being developed at that time. So I decided to join them. Worked for them for a couple of years as part of the engineering team building their biggest routers of that time, the internet infrastructure. Learned a lot.

(Manish at 00:02:03) Then a senior colleague of mine was starting a company in Wi-Fi, enterprise Wi-Fi. So I decided to join him. Was in the Valley, wanted to be part of a startup. I think everyone in the Valley wants to do that once, so I did that. I joined that company when they were three months old. They were just going through their Series A and found.

(Manish at 00:02:22) I was with them for six years, different roles. The company grew, eventually got sold. And then once they got sold, I decided to quit and I took a detour. I went back to school, actually. I did my MBA from University of Chicago.

(Manish at 00:02:38) Got into corporate development, got into strategic investments, worked for a venture fund for a while. And then ended up coming back to the industry at a company called Aruba Networks. At Aruba, I was the first corporate development hire there. I was with them from 2010 to 2015. Did a few acquisitions for them. Took them into access, access policy, and security space.

(Manish at 00:03:05) And during that time, it was a really good part of my career. The Wi-Fi industry was growing really fast. Apple had been releasing iPhones and iPads year after year. A lot of enterprises were adopting these devices, and there were a very healthy set of problems that enterprises were having to deal with as these devices came, either owned by employees or monitored by senior execs. And we were solving all these problems.

(Manish at 00:03:28) Then in 2015, HP Hewlett Packard Enterprise decided to acquire Aruba. We went through that transaction, became part of the networking business inside HPE. I was with them for the next four years, and then decided to do it all over again. Came to Cradlepoint. Again, a private company, small company, sort of a startup, with plans to grow and sort of build the next wave of mobility.

(Manish at 00:03:57) What Wi-Fi did to the local area networking for enterprises, the work that we are doing now, we think we have a chance to take that to the next level and make mobility possible for larger-scale deployments and larger-scale use cases. That's what we have been working on, trying to disrupt and develop a new way for enterprises to make use of wireless technologies.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:20) That's really cool. I heard you mention in there that you spent a little bit of time at a VC firm. Did you ever think about getting into fintech after that, or were you always itching to get back into networking?

(Manish at 00:04:33) So my domain expertise has always been in communications and networking, enterprise-focused connectivity solutions. So there was that. I did not think about fintech. I think the domain expertise kept me coming back to networking and enterprise communications.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:51) Nice. So how did you actually meet the team at Cradlepoint, and what convinced you to come on board?

(Manish at 00:04:57) So when I was at Aruba, I had actually looked at Cradlepoint for a potential acquisition. I had looked at the company, talked to the management team several times, and for various reasons, that acquisition could not go through. So I was familiar with the team and what the company was doing. And it just so happened that when I left Aruba, I got an outreach from a recruiter about a week outside of that job. So they did not tell me the name of the company.

(Manish at 00:05:26) They said, "Hey, here's a fast-growing SaaS company that's trying to go public, and they're looking for someone to come and lead." So I spoke to them, and that's how the connection to Cradlepoint got made. And once I came to know the name of the company, I knew the business reasonably well, and it was relatively fast after that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:43) That's awesome. So we also did an episode with Donna Johnson from Cradlepoint, but for those that may not have listened to that, can you give the overview of what the company does?

(Manish at 00:05:53) Yeah. So Cradlepoint is the largest provider of wireless WAN solutions for enterprises. What it means is for enterprises that want to use cellular technology as a way to connect their assets to their back-end infrastructure or to public cloud, we provide subscription-based solutions that they can use to connect these assets to wherever they want to. The way the product is offered, we sell routers in different form factors that all come bundled with a cloud-based subscription of a software that allows you to do network management. It allows you to do user policies, some security functions, and manage these routers at scale.

(Manish at 00:06:38) As an example, there are customers of ours who have tens of thousands of these routers that they have deployed in the field. And these customers are able to manage these routers from a single console in the cloud, set policies, monitor them, change configuration, and do lifecycle management, do all kinds of things from a single console. So it makes their life really easy for enterprises that have lean IT staff, that have distributed locations, that have tens of thousands of IoT devices in the field. One of our customers is a pretty large DVD rental company that has more than 75,000 DVD rental machines that are located in other retailers. And Cradlepoint provides the connectivity for these machines.

(Manish at 00:07:22) So they can manage the connectivity from a single console as opposed to trying to manage them on an individual basis. We are also pretty strong in public safety. There are a lot of police organizations, fire organizations, and other fleets that have a lot of vehicles. They use us for connectivity inside these vehicles. And this connectivity has become pretty sophisticated over the last few years.

(Manish at 00:07:45) An average police car has 20 to 30 different IoT devices, from video cameras to scanners to their software that they use to do queries and input into. So it's a pretty high-bandwidth kind of use case and pretty mission-critical use case. We cannot afford to lose that connectivity. The car is recording, right? Everything that happens around the car 24/7.

(Manish at 00:08:07) So we partner with a company called Axon, and we provide those solutions to police vehicles, a pretty reliable connectivity option when you're on the road outside of the building. And then thirdly, in fixed branch deployments for medium-sized businesses, for distributed enterprises where there are small footprints, our solutions act as a pretty useful way to connect because they are really easy to deploy. You don't have to pull any wires.

(Manish at 00:08:39) You don't have to worry about, in rural areas or second- or third-tier cities, for example, you don't have to worry about some tractor accidentally cutting your cable and you being out of internet for three weeks. So you don't have any of those problems. The deployment takes minutes. The management is pretty simple. You can manage everything from a single console, as talked about earlier. And the recovery from failures is pretty good. The other thing that does not get mentioned a lot is in the U.S., there are more than 2,700 wired service providers. So if you are an enterprise that has hundreds of branches or thousands of locations, then if you want to set up your wired network in these branches, you're negotiating contracts with tens or hundreds of these wired service providers. Whereas if you use cellular, then you have to deal with an AT&T and Verizon, one or two of them.

(Manish at 00:09:25) Right? So it's a pretty simple, easy-to-manage process on the procurement side as well. So if we simplify the connectivity options for enterprises, our core IP is that we have done a lot of work in making sure that these cellular connections stay up, they are enterprise class, and they are secure. So there's a lot of work that has been done around that, and that these solutions end up being very usable for an increasing set of enterprise use cases.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:54) That's really cool. I'm glad you mentioned at the end your core IP and where you really differentiate. Because while it sounds like you're leading this kind of enterprise cellular connectivity thing, it also sounds to me like it's kind of an inevitable endpoint where we're going to end up with lots and lots of businesses being on the same kind of thing, just because it makes sense to be able to manage all of your networks in one platform, like you said. And I feel like there's probably going to be some more entrants coming in in the coming years. But just the fact that you've already gotten so far with it sounds like you're in a pretty good spot. That's really cool.

(Manish at 00:10:39) Yeah. I mean, my experience, having been in the enterprise Wi-Fi space for a number of years, is for most enterprises, mobility is an advantage. It's a significant advantage because if you're able to provide connectivity while making people mobile and while making enterprise assets mobile, it provides a lot of advantages to enterprise customers. And that's one of the things that led to the growth of enterprise Wi-Fi over the last two decades. And the things that have sort of held back the adoption of cellular technology in enterprise, those barriers are slowly going away.

(Manish at 00:11:17) So as those barriers go away, there's no reason why more and more use cases in enterprises cannot be supported by cellular technology. And that's sort of the wave that we are riding. We have a lot of operating history in this space and what is called tribal knowledge in the space of what it takes to make a cellular connection enterprise class, to make it really easy to use, to keep it secure, to keep the bandwidth high enough, how do you handle demanding applications, how do you prioritize enterprise applications. Things like that, we've done a lot of work on. And so we feel that as the high-level barriers around cellular go away, which are already starting to go away worldwide, we have a good chance of providing an increasing set of use cases for enterprises.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:06) So obviously, working in the cellular space, 5G has been a really big deal for you guys. How has it affected your business rolling out to the mainstream?

(Manish at 00:12:17) So it is still early stage. I think 5G will have a lot of impact on our business as well as the networking industry as a whole. And there are multiple reasons for that. So one is just the increase in bandwidth and the increase in capacity. And what that does is it allows operators to offer data plans which are high-bandwidth, high-throughput kind of data plans with higher or maybe no data caps.

(Manish at 00:12:45) Right? So what that does is for enterprises, even the use cases that require more bandwidth than what is currently possible actually become possible. And once they become possible, then it is mobility trumps having a fixed connection, right? So if you recall the enterprise Wi-Fi analog, then back in 2002, 2003 time frame, when we had 802.11b, the bandwidths were pretty low.

(Manish at 00:13:12) And people were still trying to use Wi-Fi, but it was not as prevalent as what it became later. One of the things, one of the reasons why it became prevalent later, was because technology kept on evolving. There was more bandwidth available. And before people realized, what most enterprises started finding was 90% of their traffic was going over Wi-Fi. So even though they had, they were investing a lot of money on their wired switches and wired infrastructure, but people were not using it.

(Manish at 00:13:36) People were on Wi-Fi. A similar thing is happening here, which is if you have an option of a cellular connectivity that is good enough or that allows you to deploy our kind of products to connect people and assets, then we see that enterprises prefer that option over having a wired connectivity. There are multiple advantages that they can move capacity around, and mobility has a lot of advantage, and so they want to take things over.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:04) So what are some use cases that are going to be made possible as 5G technology develops?

(Manish at 00:14:10) So the fixed branch is a big one. What has happened traditionally is for most of the branch connectivity and office connectivity, there is a wire that gets pulled in, either from a Comcast or some other cable operator. There is a wire that gets pulled in, and that's how you get your internet connectivity in offices. With 5G, there is an option of having that primary connectivity be provided by cellular. So you can buy a subscription from AT&T or Verizon.

(Manish at 00:14:40) You can deploy a Cradlepoint-like router, and you have an enterprise-class primary router that takes care of all of your WAN connectivity. And it comes with the same set of security technologies. It comes with the same set of management technologies that allow you to manage tens of thousands of branches from a single console. And what that does is it removes a lot of complexity from the network. Your cost of installing these devices is much lower.

(Manish at 00:15:10) Your cost of maintaining and operating these devices over the lifecycle of the devices is much lower. If you are an organization that is what we call a lean IT organization, you don't have tens or hundreds of folks in IT to manage these networks, then our wireless solutions are pretty attractive because you can manage a pretty large-scale network with two or three people, which is what we are seeing so many of our customers do, and they get attracted because of that. And that's one. And then, of course, 5G has an impact on high-bandwidth, demanding use cases inside campuses and factory floors and inside the buildings as well. And that is led by the development of this 5G slicing and private cellular networks and other LAN technologies that are developing right now, which sort of increase the value of 5G for enterprises.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:07) That's awesome. So when you're thinking about between cellular connections and fiber, do you think that eventually one wins or there's use cases for both forever?

(Manish at 00:16:20) I think there'll be use cases for both, at least for the foreseeable future. I mean, just like there have been use cases for both wired and wireless on the LAN side, right, from both Wi-Fi as well as wired switching.

(Manish at 00:16:32) What we saw over time is users prefer wireless over wired, and therefore IT preferred wireless over wired. So a similar kind of transition will happen here as well. To the extent that the barriers that have existed historically around cellular get removed, and there are efforts being made to remove those barriers, to the extent that the data plans from operators become more and more enterprise friendly, we will see enterprises adopting cellular to a much larger extent than what they did historically.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:08) That's really cool. So one thing that I've seen on the Cradlepoint website is the term private cellular networks. And my base knowledge of networks in general is not super high. So can you help me understand what a private cellular network is?

(Manish at 00:17:27) Absolutely. So if you think about it from an enterprise perspective, historically, they have had two kinds of wireless available to them. Right? So they can connect their devices wirelessly through a wireless LAN, which is an IEEE-based 802.11 technology, which is a contention-based technology. It's sort of a derivative of Ethernet, and that operates over unlicensed spectrum.

(Manish at 00:17:53) There are multiple spectrums which are all unlicensed, and anybody can set up a network, create a Wi-Fi network, and start broadcasting stuff on that frequency. There are pros and cons of that technology. And of course, because the advantages are so amazing over having a wired connection, in the last two decades, a lot of work has been done to get over the limitations of the technology as it existed two decades ago, as well as improve that technology significantly. Right? So Wi-Fi today is very different from what it was when it started. And it's a very big success story in terms of adoption of technology in the world.

(Manish at 00:18:32) So that's one option that enterprises have had. And the second option that they have had is the public cellular connectivity, which is when you get outside the building, if you want to connect, then cellular is sort of the only option. And you use the operator-built cell phone towers to connect to the macro network, and that's how we get into that connection. That's how all of our cell phones get connected. Right?

(Manish at 00:18:52) What is missing is something in between because the technologies are built upon a different stack. There are inherent advantages that LTE and 5G have over contention-based technologies like Wi-Fi. However, because the spectrum has always been owned by operators, enterprises have not had a chance to build an enterprise class network that is in their control, that they can manage like an enterprise network and sort of take advantages of the base technologies with the control and policy that they can put over it. And that is changing recently, and that's what is called the private cellular network. The idea here is to have a networking technology that takes away some of the limitations that exist with Wi-Fi, but at the same time takes away some of the barriers that have existed over cellular.

(Manish at 00:19:42) And the way it works is, in the US, for example, there is a standards body initiative for the past few years called CBRS, which is Citizens Broadband Radio Service, where the FCC freed up a set of frequencies, a spectrum of 3.5 to 3.7 gigahertz. And they said this spectrum, we will not auction to the standard operators. What we'll do is we'll make it lightly licensed where there are three categories of how you can get access to those frequencies. But once you get access to the frequency, then you can own and operate it like a private network. So one part of that frequency is sort of like a renter.

(Manish at 00:20:20) Right? So you can send a query to a central authority. You can get access to that spectrum for a period of time. You can transmit over that frequency. You could create a network, create your own wireless network, and when you are done, you release a frequency back to the central authority.

(Manish at 00:20:37) And that allows enterprises to create a wireless network that has a bigger range outdoors, for example. So you can have a wireless network that can span a few kilometers, or a few miles, which was not possible with Wi-Fi. The range for LTE outdoors is much larger than the range for Wi-Fi. And for indoor, there were environments that used to be RF-challenged with Wi-Fi. These are heavy metal, high metal environments. These are older buildings. These are situations where the Wi-Fi signal propagation was not that good. And LTE has better signal propagation characteristics in those environments. So for those kind of environments, you can now create a wireless network that has good signal strength that allows you yet another option to build a wireless network. And we are seeing adoption in multiple areas for PCNs because of these advantages that it has over other wireless technologies.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:36) First question I have is, so do you only need control over that specific frequency to create the network and then it's there and it exists for you? Or do you need the frequency the whole time you're using it?

(Manish at 00:21:50) So think of it as a channel. Right? So the frequency that you acquire, you're getting a channel to transmit data on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:57) Yeah.

(Manish at 00:21:58) And to the extent that you have rights to use that channel, you can transmit on that channel. And then once you are done, you can hand it back to the pool. So this is very similar to how our devices get IP addresses. Right? So whenever you boot a laptop, it does a query to get an address.

(Manish at 00:22:17) And there is a DHCP server that gives it an address, and it has a time expiration associated with it. And after that time, it either renews or it lets go of that IP address. So it's a similar concept here. Anyone who wants access to a channel requests a central SAS authority to get a channel. And once they get a channel, they can use it. Once they are done, they can release it back.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:42) Okay. Cool. So that would be like if I'm in an executive suite office building here in Orlando, has a ton of people, a ton of different companies rent here. And if they wanted to provide a private cellular network, they would set that up at a nearby cell tower, and then it would basically provide blanket connection for the area and whatever buildings they have in it. Is that correct?

(Manish at 00:23:07) So you would not have to use the cell towers of public operators.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:11) Okay.

(Manish at 00:23:11) The deployment will be very similar to how Wi-Fi works in your building. So someone would come and install those access points that go on the ceilings. There would be indoor and outdoor versions of those access points. And those access points will be transmitting over those frequencies that you get from SAS. That would be the LTE access point instead of a Wi-Fi access point.

(Manish at 00:23:35) Completely enterprise-managed and enterprise-controlled. You do not need to work with the CSP for that model. Now this is a US-specific model. Similar models exist in other countries as well. In some countries, like Germany, for example, there is an option where an enterprise could lease a spectrum from an operator. So you could go to an AT&T-like operator there, the leading operators there, and lease a frequency for some time, for six months, for a year, for a couple of years. You pay them a fee, and you have exclusive rights to using that frequency. And so you could build a private cellular network, start transmitting on that frequency, and because you have rights to that frequency, build your own private cellular network and run your network like that.

(Manish at 00:24:20) So a number of automotive companies use this for their manufacturing plants for wide area connectivity because these plants tend to be a few miles long. And private cellular offers a very attractive way of connecting these locations.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:36) Okay. Yeah. That's really interesting. So what are some skills that are needed for the IT staff to set up and manage a private cellular network?

(Manish at 00:24:46) Yeah. So I think the industry is going through a transition. Historically, these products have been complex to deploy, and there is a lot of interest in the space that is starting to happen after CBRS has got ratified and after a number of entities showed interest in auction of that spectrum that happened last year. But what we are seeing is there's a significant simplification of the offerings that is happening for enterprises, and a number of startups that are starting to work in this space to simplify the offerings, to make the TCO smaller and so on. Historically, if you were trying to deploy this kind of network, you would have to go through a planning process to ensure that you are getting good coverage and good signal strength in every location that you want to provide connectivity to.

(Manish at 00:25:35) You would have to do an analysis of the kind of bandwidth that you want, the number of devices that you want to connect, and what kind of applications you're running. And based on that analysis, you would deploy the radios at appropriate locations. You would do some testing around signal strength, and that's how the network will be deployed. Other challenges that have existed historically have included having to deal with multiple vendors to set up this kind of network. So you would get the radios from company one. You would get the core software from company two.

(Manish at 00:26:03) And then you will get a systems integrator who will come together and try to do the planning piece and try to maybe offer managed service for this. So it has been less than optimal kind of model. But there is significant simplification going on now. And what will happen in the next year to two years is these products will become really simple to use, very similar to Wi-Fi. And what you'll see is the large set of channel partners, VARs, that have built expertise in Wi-Fi over the last few years will extend their expertise towards building these kind of networks. So for enterprises, it would be a simple matter of connecting with one of these VARs who would have this expertise. The incremental expertise inside IT in the next two years will not be significant. If you manage a Wi-Fi network, then it should be similar to do it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:58) So how should a company think about deciding between a managed service or trying to set up their private cellular themselves?

(Manish at 00:27:08) There are different things that come into play in that decision. I think a lot has to do with what your core business is and how much responsibility or burden your IT team is willing to take in managing this network, running this network, and debugging problems if and when they happen on this network. Right? And different companies have different philosophies around that. But what we will see is an increasing number of managed service providers setting up ways for enterprises to consume this as a managed service.

(Manish at 00:27:39) And we will also see other enterprises just buy this as a product and manage it on their own using their internal IT staff. I think both the models will be prevalent for a while.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:52) That makes sense. Yeah. I mean, I guess it just depends on the company and what they need. There's always going to be uses for both of those. So one thing I wanted to talk to you about, I want to talk a little bit about giving back to the community. Because a little while ago, we had on this company called Cactus Group that does custom software development, and they're really cool. Their CTO is a really awesome, nice guy, and he's done a lot in his community through ethical hacking initiatives. And he started—he's in Durham, the city of Durham. He started a Code for Durham thing, which is really cool. And I saw on the Cradlepoint website that you guys also have some stuff with a program called First Connect.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:34) Can you tell me a little bit about that?

(Manish at 00:28:37) Yeah. So we have a pretty close relationship with FirstNet, AT&T's FirstNet initiative. And as we talked about earlier, we have a lot of law enforcement organizations that use Cradlepoint products for their connectivity needs. We are very closely connected to that community, and we try to do, outside of business, work to help that community. So that's what that initiative is about.

(Manish at 00:29:05) There's a lot of work being done to help widows and to help other families of those law enforcement officers, and that's what that initiative is about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:17) That's cool. And you said you also provide connectivity in fire trucks and stuff too?

(Manish at 00:29:21) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:22) That's awesome. So I didn't realize that your technology was able to be used in a vehicle that's always moving. I guess previously I had thought that it could move around, but ideally it was set up in a place and stayed. Because Donna was telling me about dark kitchens using Cradlepoint stuff and how they would set up shop and set up their connection there with their cellular network. And then sometimes they'd have to get up and move somewhere else.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:58) But that's really interesting that it can be used in vehicles and stuff too. I imagine that'll be pretty useful as self-driving cars become more prevalent and people are working more on the road.

(Manish at 00:30:14) Yeah. So I mean, for fleets, it's an extremely useful way to connect. And because the difference between using a cell phone and using a cell phone hotspot versus a Cradlepoint-like device is ours is an enterprise class device. Right? So it comes with packaged security, bundled security. It comes with enterprise policy and so on. So I can, for example, take the Cradlepoint router, connect it in my car, and I have an extension of my office network in my car. And we see enterprises use it in that manner that when people are working from home, people are working from anywhere, they can carry this small device with them, and they just need to power it on. It connects to the cellular network, and you have an extension of your enterprise network to that location. You don't have to worry about security.

(Manish at 00:31:01) You don't have to worry about VPNs. You don't have to worry about any of those things. It all happens automatically. So from an enterprise perspective, compliance requirements get met. From a security perspective, you don't have to worry about user-owned devices that are trying to connect to the same network as your enterprise devices are trying to connect in a home network. For example, if I connect my office laptop to the home Wi-Fi, I'm sharing that network with all of my family devices. Right? All of the kids' devices, Netflix, and other high bandwidth applications. Whereas if I connect to a Cradlepoint, then I have an isolated network that only is used for the business reasons.

(Manish at 00:31:44) So that allows a lot of advantages, and we are seeing customers get attracted to that value proposition. If you have an isolated network, which is not competing for bandwidth with other devices that may be at the home location, as well as you can have your own dedicated security policies on this network that as enterprise IT, you will not have control over your employees' home networks, but you can have control over this network.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:08) Yeah. That sounds like a pretty good solution to a lot of conversations about should employees get their internet bill covered by the company or an electric bill per diem when they're working from home. Or they could just send you a little Cradlepoint router and that solves that.

(Manish at 00:32:29) Yeah. It does. And also, I mean, another advantage is that when you do it from an enterprise IT perspective, carriers already have ways for enterprises to negotiate bulk data plans with them. Right? So we can use a bulk data plan, and you can roll it out to most of your employees and have a pretty economical solution while providing them home connectivity, while taking care of your compliance issues, making sure that the connection is secure, the data is not getting leaked.

(Manish at 00:32:59) All of those issues you handle and, again, really easy to manage.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:04) Yeah, that's awesome. So I want to get into a little bit of leadership questions before we wrap up. Is that cool?

(Manish at 00:33:11) Yeah, absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:13) So earlier in the interview, you were telling me how you've done a lot in your career, been in a lot of different companies. When you first join a company in a leadership role, how do you establish yourself as a leader at that company?

(Manish at 00:33:26) I think so there are two parts to it. So first is every company goes through a journey from where they started from to where they are right now. And it's really important to respect that. Every company goes through a journey and decisions get made because of a reason, right? So my philosophy is that whenever you get into a new role, you've got to take some time to understand what the context is for the decisions that have been made in the past. And you have to develop trust, right? A leader is only as successful as the team. And so if you don't have the trust of the team and if you continue to stay as an outsider, you don't have a chance of being successful at your role. So you've got to learn. You've got to come at it as someone who does not know as much as people who have been with that business for a while. And be honest and transparent about what you know and what you don't and be willing to learn. That's really, really important. The second phase of it is it's a two-way thing. I think this is where a company culture is really important and different companies are at different levels in this. And that culture is of an honesty and sort of understanding your limitations and being open to listening to other perspectives. And different companies are at different stages of this. But good companies have leadership teams who are pretty open to new ideas and who are open to a different perspective. And it's really important to evaluate that when you go into a new role or when you go into a new company. Because that kind of a culture is a culture of what I call growth mindset. It allows companies to evolve to the next stage because every company goes through problems. Every company goes through challenges. But it's that mindset of being able to evolve, being able to react, being able to improve that drives, I think, successful companies from the not so successful ones.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:20) Oh, man. Yeah, that was very, very good. You had that answer ready, dude. So you were talking about how important it is to focus on the culture through coming to a new company. How do you—what's your approach to cultivating the culture at Cradlepoint?

(Manish at 00:35:42) So historically, I think a lot of the culture in the early stages of the company gets driven by founders and early employees. Which is why most people say that when you start a company and when you are in an early stage company, you want to be really careful with the hires that you make because you're not only impacting the role that this person would do, but you're also impacting the next 10 people that they could hire. So you have to be really careful with the kind of people that you hire early on, and that's what sort of creates the culture. At scale, once you get to—and there are different—I think there are different steps that you go through. So companies of less than 50 employees, culture is really easy to manage. Once you get from 50 to 250 employees, it's a different stage where you've got to trust your leaders to build the right culture around them. And then once you get beyond 250, then it has to be a corporate issue. So what that means is, if you are a growth company, if you are hiring a number of employees, then you've got to take time out to ensure that you're educating the new employees and making them aware of what is important versus what is not so important. Different companies have different cultures, and different employees come with different backgrounds. I mean, in general, they've gone through the interview process, they're pretty strong in their function, right? But having an alignment on that culture and continuing that alignment culture is really important for the company as a whole to be productive. So on our side, what we do is we take a lot of effort in continuing external classes, external initiatives where we bring experts inside and create workshops that different teams can participate in and try to let culture be something that is built from consensus. Not having culture be a fixed thing, but something that is an evolving thing that comes out of the people that are in the company at any point of time. So the culture of this year is different from what it was two years ago, and it would be different from what it will be two years from now. As long as the core principles are around that idea of being honest, being transparent, having a growth mindset—all of those things—as long as we can get people to agree on those things, I think we are on the right track. But we've got to be very careful in not letting the negative things spread, to sort of stop them early on by being proactive in communicating, by being proactive in highlighting the right behaviors and so on, and making sure that the culture remains healthy. And we put a lot of effort on that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:23) So what does that look like in practice when you see a negative part of the culture cropping up and you're like, oh, we should stop that? What does that look like?

(Manish at 00:38:31) I mean, so we try to manage it carefully. It's not about—we try to make sure that it doesn't come across as blaming someone, right? So the way you do that is you continue to enforce the positive things. You continue to highlight examples of positive behaviors. And we continue to caution in larger forums things that could be negative behaviors and could be causing an impediment to the growth and doing the right thing. So as long as you do that, I think people who are on the wrong side of the line get the message and they're pretty quick and self-correct. Most people want to do the right thing, which is—

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:13) Yeah. Yeah, that's smart. It's, um, because you really want to avoid making anyone get defensive because then that's not productive for anyone.

(Manish at 00:39:22) Absolutely. Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:25) So I've got one more question for you. What are you learning right now? What's challenging you?

(Manish at 00:39:31) Lot of things. So we are part of Ericsson now. Last year, we were acquired by Ericsson. And inside Ericsson, we are Ericsson's largest acquisition for more than a decade. And we have a mandate to build an enterprise business inside Ericsson. So we have been doing a lot of work in figuring out how that enterprise business should look like, what markets we should go after, how does Cradlepoint evolve to the next stage. And we have been providing WAN connectivity so far, but now we have a mandate to become a bigger enterprise networking and security business. So we are doing a lot of work in making that transition happen. And then, of course, 5G is coming and is going to impact all of us pretty significantly in the next three years. So we see that as a transformation for Cradlepoint. The business, if you look at two years ago, it used to be primarily a North America-based company. Now it's a global company. We have more than a thousand employees. We're continuing to grow really, really fast. If we look at ourselves three years down the line, this will be a global company that's providing a broad portfolio of network and security products to enterprises centered around cellular technology. So as 5G becomes more mainstream in enterprises and the enterprise would be—we want enterprise to increasingly look at Cradlepoint as a trusted partner for their connectivity and security needs centered around 5G. So there's a lot of work happening around that. So that's what we spend a lot of time thinking about and evolving our portfolio around that. What does it take for enterprises to trust cellular as a viable way of connectivity for both their local area network as well as their wide area network? And how do we ensure that we are offering really easy to use, simple to deploy solutions that enterprises can use while tackling the barriers that have existed historically around adoption of cellular?

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:38) So you're learning a lot, thinking about the future in every direction all at once.

(Manish at 00:41:45) That's one way to put it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:48) All right. Well, before we wrap up, is there anything that we didn't get to touch on today that we want to make sure we cover?

(Manish at 00:41:54) No, I mean, thank you once again for this opportunity. I really appreciate it. And I'm very excited about being at Cradlepoint. I think it's a once in a decade kind of transition that we are going through because of 5G. And it will have a profound impact on enterprise connectivity and security, and we're very excited to be part of that transition and being able to play a role in making that transition happen.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:20) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you would like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.