The Father of the Cable Modem on Broadband, AI & Hype with Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to the father of the cable modem, Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard, about how he invented the cable modem and his take on current hype cycles. Thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring this episode. For simple cloud and powerful AI that's built to scale, visit digitalocean.com or just click the link in the show notes. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:30) You have the title "Father of the Cable Modem." How did you get that title?

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:00:34) So in the 1988 time frame, the editor of the magazine called CED, Communication Electronic Design, really chose every year a person of the year or man of the year. And because I was working in the industry at the time and trying for the first time for the cable industry to create the momentum for interoperability and delivery of the first certified cable modem, which was a global standard, he valued my work as an individual who was driving everything of that nature. I was working at that time for an organization called CableLabs as executive consultant, and he happened to choose me for the title. In fact, I called him right away when he called me about it. I said, "You probably don't want to do that because I keep a low profile, and you're not going to get that much advertising from the other people in your magazine." Because as you know, magazines live and die with advertising. But he said, "No, you deserve it. You got it. I'm going to call you the father of the cable modem and man of the year." And that's how I started that activity with Roger Brown. Unfortunately, we lost Roger Brown a couple years later to cancer, and he was a great friend of mine in the sense of helping him to understand the impact of data communication to the community, to the hospitals, to the education system, to the government, how it works. And he was a strong writer and did a very nice job to educate the media and audiences about the power of the cable modem and, as a result, broadband.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:18) Were there several different people trying to create this standard for the cable modem, and then yours just got picked? How did it work?

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:02:26) Pretty good idea. So we go back to the 1995 time frame. My company, a startup company, LANCity, had done a very good job, and we had about 90% market share in the cable industry at the time for a proprietary cable modem that we had built. As a result, we had come up with a patented technology on the aspect of the cable modem called, let's say, data protocol. The technical term was media access control. But we invented the data protocol, efficient data protocol that can work over long distance at high speed using cable TV infrastructure. So the cable industry has an association called CableLabs. They put an RFI back in 1995, thanks to executives of the industry, Billy Schleier and John Malone, that they wanted the data modems and cable modem to be a global standard versus being proprietary devices. So CableLabs, which is an association of all the cable industry players, put an RFI—request for information—to get all the information regarding what technology is available. We put our technology there for them to analyze, to review, and there were two other companies, Broadcom/3Com and General Instruments, that also put their information in there, as well as maybe 30, 40, 50 other companies. In the end, the cable industry selected General Instruments, Broadcom, 3Com, and our technology put together to create the standardization called DOCSIS. That effort started in 1996 immediately after the cable industry show that we had, the Western Cable TV Show in California, and took about three years before the standard became available in real product with interoperability. And I was the person in charge of bringing all the interoperability and innovation between multiple vendors together. And that's how the four companies' technology came together to create DOCSIS, which just stands for Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification, to the industry as a standardization.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:48) Yeah, there's a lot of similarities between your story and the story of Taher. Do you know him, the father of SSL?

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:04:55) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:56) Yeah, he described a very similar—he's like, "There's a lot of people, everyone was kind of doing it," but he got involved with creating the standard.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:05:07) Yes, that was—in our industry, the cable industry is a very good collaboration industry in the sense that if you look at the founding of the cable industry back in the late 1940s, 1950, they were really known as the cowboys. I mean, the cowboys because each one had a vision of how to get the cable to people's homes. Nobody wanted to finance them, nobody wanted to give them loans, nobody wanted to really give them recognition for what they were doing. But yet each individual went and built, like, 400 or 500 separate small cable companies around the country. And then the mentality—they merged and merged and merged, came together. Now there's a handful, maybe a dozen left from the 400 that started. So the story worked the same for the high-speed cable modem. Nobody wanted to fund it, nobody wanted to really appreciate it, nobody wanted to think that, "Why would people need Internet from home? What are they going to do with it?" This is 1987, 1988 when I started. Every investor I went to and even the cable industry I had been to, they said, "Well, tell me one more time, why would anybody with a clear mind want to have a computer at home? You go to the office, you play with your computer." Guess what? COVID 2020 pandemic showed everybody they were wrong, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:30) That is wild. It's so crazy. Yeah, to live in a time where people would argue that the personal home computer—that's not going to catch on.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:06:40) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:40) That's hilarious because we all have them in our pockets now, and we're with them 24/7.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:06:44) In fact, if you look at it, Joel, because of the cable modem, we created the broadband era, which the broadband era put Gen Z in a complete mobility world. Because before that, most Gen Z, when I talked to them in a university, they don't even know what dial-up was. They have no clue that we used to wait with a 28.8 kilobits per second modem. They'd hear beeps and burps, and maybe the phone gets connected, maybe it doesn't. They came to the mobility world, and all the mobility world's foundation and backbone is driven on the broadband infrastructure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:18) Oh, I remember the day broadband came out—well, at least the day that we got it. My dad was a software and hardware engineer, so we always had the—

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:07:28) What company was he working for?

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:30) He was working for a company that invented the screens that go inside golf carts.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:07:34) I see, got it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:35) So, you know, they track GPS. And so my childhood—the smell of my childhood is like baked electronics in the garage.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:07:46) That's cool. Yeah, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:52) So I grew up around it, and I would always get his old computers. I had a 100-foot phone cable that would go from the one phone outlet in the center of the house and wire that into my room. I'd run it after school. I'd get to use it until my parents came home, and then they'd be like, "Clean up the cable," and then I would have to undo it. So I remember that big transition from the 56k to—what did he get? He got, like, a T1 at work.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:08:17) T1, 1.54 megahertz, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:21) Yeah, that was fun. And then broadband all of a sudden overnight just became—everybody had it. Like, no one had dial-up anymore. It was just everybody had it, and the Internet was fast. Yeah, it was great. How did—okay, so when I was preparing for this interview, I read something about M&Ms and gummy bears being involved in the company. You've got to tell me more about that.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:08:45) Sure. So the story was we were a small company, very frugal. We had to work sometimes two shifts and three shifts in order to accomplish the goals we had. We were a small number of engineers, a handful, maybe about 20 altogether—13 employees at a time, seven advisors. And what I used to have—I started actually with the gummy bears first that I had in my office. And instead of calling a meeting, the guys would come and grab one or two gummy bears, and then we'd talk about the goals or objective, whatever we had on that given day. And then sometimes my staff would come on the second shift in order to test—they were running to see what the result looks like and run another test overnight. Then when they come tomorrow, it's in a better situation to see what result we have to do. And they would bring their daughters or sons with them, either from the sports activities or picking them up from the schools or whatever. And then the kids got used to picking up gummy bears and things of that nature. And then we moved from gummy bears to M&Ms, and the same story during the meeting times. And when the people, the workers would come for second, third shift, the kids would come and grab it. So in the end of the week, we were almost going through 10 pounds of the gummy bears and the M&Ms. And then that was a way for us, A, to meet naturally, but B, more as a way for the kids who came to have something to eat and play with or sometimes in that nature while their fathers or their mothers were helping to get the second set of the test running. That's how we built two shifts or third shifts to work. But the more important than gummy bears and M&Ms was that we also used to, before Silicon Valley even existed, treat our employees with homemade foods. We'd bring homemade foods and have it there in our little kitchens, and the guys would have it for the second shift again. And sometimes they would stay because of the good food coming in from what my mom used to cook. And that was another way to keep my employees longer at the office to work and get more productivity because we just didn't have enough time and enough money.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:04) Was this your first company, LANCity?

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:11:06) LANCity from the innovation and startup, yes, was my first company. I had 12 other companies after that that I worked with as a serial entrepreneur. Prior to that, I used to work with a company called General Electric, GE. In GE, I learned how the TV, cable TV works. And then I joined another company after that called Proteon. And Proteon was making data networking, high-speed LANs, and a combination of the two experiences between the LAN company, which taught me data networking, and GE, which taught me about cable TV and television systems, gave me the idea that, "Wow, what about data over cable system? Wouldn't that be a good way to get to people's homes?" Why? Because you're probably—your audience will appreciate that. Up to 1987, Joel, there were only two types of networks. The lowest speed, long distance that was using the phone line and the dial-up modem, and then high-speed short distance, which is local area networking. So nobody had high-speed long distance, which is what we innovated with our LANCity solution. So that's how the story came about, my vision of creating my startup and building LANCity, which I gave it the name LANCity simply because "take the local network citywide" was a really easy way to tell the marketing story of my technology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:34) I love that. And then how did you finance the business? Did you use cash that you had saved? Did you get a contract early on to start it? How did you bridge that gap?

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:12:44) So we had four levels of evolution in our startup. The first, and the most important, was we did some consulting, and we used the consulting money to be able to develop our prototype. Soon after that, we were able to work with the universities, hospitals, government bases, and sell some of our prototypes at a high price of $18,000, which is really what it cost us to make. And that brought the second part of the revenue to us. Then thirdly, I was working with a company that you might recall, Digital Equipment Corporation, known as DEC. DEC was really well known in Ethernet activity and connectivity. So we worked with them, and we showed them that, "Hey, your Ethernet that goes over a mile, I can get that Ethernet to go over 200 miles." And they called the cable modem by then—so at that time, ETV, Ethernet over cable TV. And they were able to help me with some financing to be able to integrate my technology and build siliconization. And that was the third aspect. And the last, when we were able to build our second generation, we started selling that product, and we self-financed it from that one. The venture capitalists in the cable industry did not believe, A, that the cable industry would be able to handle and manage data to the consumer, and then B, that they're able—the venture capitalists didn't think they could recover any investment they made in that area. So both the cable industry and venture capitalists did not want to fund us. So we did self-funding, what I call "earn to grow," which is how it worked for us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:28) That's how I've done my three companies.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:14:30) Good for you. Yeah, it works very well, right? It's organic, you know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:35) Yeah. Well, I think it's a critical part of the product validation, right? Like, if it's such a pain, if there's so much pain that people are willing to pay almost before a solution exists or for consulting to help to figure out the problem, then there's enough pain for them to purchase a really good version of a product that solves that problem.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:14:56) Right. And I always tell people, this is where the product does the talking instead of the PowerPoint. What a better goal and a better objective that your product does the talking. And when you sell the product and the customers look at it and then play with it, A, you get a lot more feedback from them regarding the product. And then B, we can actually work with the customers and really be able to mature the product faster. So I really call that model a very useful model.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:25) And then at what point with LANCity were you like, "We—this is gone as far as it's going to go"? Did you sell it? What happened with it?

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:15:32) You've got all the right questions, Joel. That's cool. So it was around 1996 time frame that we had a low-cost product. Instead of an $18,000 product, we had a $295 product. Nine out of the top 10 MSOs, the major big MSOs, were my customers. Then we had about 400 MSOs overall as our customers. We were growing almost from $0 in 1990 revenue per quarter to almost $40 million in revenue. And some of the cable industry colleagues were saying, "Hey, Rouzbeh, we like your product, we like your technology, but you're just a small company, and we don't want to risk our business of high-speed data over that." So I talked with my employees. My employees who all had mortgages to pay, kids to send to college—all of us were saying, "Hey, a bird in the hand is better than two in the bush." So if you put the combination of what employees wanted and what my customers were saying, it was the right approach to be able to get a bigger company to own us in order to be able to entertain both the customer side and reward my employees. I used to run my company in a commonwealth methodology, you know, talk with everybody, get a common sense approach to do that.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:16:59) And within that methodology, I was able to sell the company to Bay Networks, which later Bay Networks was sold to Nortel. Nortel was sold to Arris. Arris was sold to CommScope, and now CommScope owns that. So that's how the evolution of LANcity from 1987, concept and vision I had, to 1996 happened. We had to exit and provide a larger manufacturer and a company with larger cash to be able to be in the front of the cable industry.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:34) A pretty smart move too, because that was right before the dot-com situation.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:17:38) Well, I'll give you an example. So if you look at the technology, the cable industry moved as a result of our technology from being video-centric to a telecommunication. Back in 1990, the total valuation of cable industry was not even $100 million. Today it's well over multiple trillion dollars. So if you look at it from an investment point of view, the cable industry took a lot of value, good benefit.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:18:07) And when we gave our technology to standardization, we didn't collect any royalties. We gave our technology for free to the industry to use as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:16) That's cool. That is really cool. Real quick, before we continue, I wanted to give a special shout out to DigitalOcean for sponsoring this episode. DigitalOcean is cloud infrastructure that's simple to spin up, complete with integrated AI dev tools plus 99.99% uptime SLAs and industry-leading pricing on bandwidth. We all know DigitalOcean. It's super reliable. It's been around forever. And now with DigitalOcean's Gradient platform, developers can train, fine-tune, deploy, and scale AI workloads all in one place. DigitalOcean is reliable and affordable at any budget. Companies can save up to 30% on their cloud bill when they come to DigitalOcean.

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(Intro Narrator at 00:19:07) Now, back to the episode.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:09) So you exit. You've built wealth. You've done right by your customers and your employees. And you've got this experience now of understanding these cycles of technology. How do you spend your time then?

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:19:23) So the company was sold in 1996. And as I mentioned to you, the way I got my title of the father of the cable modem was because of the effort I did from 1996 to 1999 and then through 2002 to get standardization and interoperability done. After that, you might have heard about streaming. We worked with two of the cable industry leaders, number one and number two, and we created the first standard set-top box which does streaming to people's homes. And by the way, we actually tested streaming for the first time in 1993.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:20:03) Again, the response: why would I want to stream a video? It already comes over the broadcast air. So between then until 2008, I was working in that capacity of the standardization for the industries and additional features like streaming set-top boxes. Parallel to that, I was working as an angel venture capitalist working with other startups, either as a co-founder, as a board member, as a chairman, or as an advisor to help and assist them to be able to get a couple of different technologies to the industries.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:20:41) And that continued all the way up to 2017 when I officially retired myself from working on the startups because, as you know better than anybody else having three under your belt, at some point there is no more challenge to really create a company and build a company. And I turned my energy to what I call my foundation, and our foundation does scholarships, research on cancers, able to do cultural events and things of that nature that we pursue at this point.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:15) Is that what's genuinely fulfilling to you right now?

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:21:18) Yes. Yes. Because nothing is more rewarding for me to see the young generation, the post-doctorates, the PhDs, the master's degree students, have an opportunity to, if they want to be an entrepreneur, learn from someone who has done it before and has some experience, or if they want to be able to innovate their way and they want to know what are the easiest ways to be able to do that. And most of the speaking opportunities that I do, I try to talk about those. And some scholarship that I provide to universities or individuals is all towards giving the new generation an opportunity to create an ambiance that when I was in the startup era was not available and was not there for us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:04) Is any of this information in your book, The Accidental Network?

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:22:08) Yes. There are some in there, but you can also go to my yasfoundation.com. And at yasfoundation.com, you'll see my four pillars of the foundation, and all that information is there as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:21) So young, hungry people looking to grow and change the marketplace, they can go to this Yaz Foundation, and they can...

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:22:28) Correct.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:28) They can learn these pillars. All right. Josh will include a link in the show notes so that we have that information. We'll also include a link to your book. Is it available on Amazon?

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:22:36) Yes. It's amazon.com, The Accidental Network.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:40) Nice. How long ago did you write that?

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:22:42) So we started the book in October 2022, and we finished it and published it in September 2025. So 35 months and four days, actually. So it was a long process. However, I had a co-author, Mr. Stuart Shelley, who helped me tremendously. And with Stuart's help, we were able to select WVU Press as our publisher.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:23:08) And Fortier was our public relations firm. And it takes a number of edits, number of reviews, number of structures on writing a book these days. And I'm very happy because it captured a story that was not told. Almost everybody asked me, why did you write a book now? I said, well, I was so busy from age 25 to when I was 60 years old to deliver the broadband globally and babysit my technology to make sure it does all it does, and nobody told the story of the broadband. America did great things for the world.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:23:48) What we did: first, we invented the cable modem. Then we created a business model around the cable modem. Then we empowered the cable industry to move from a video system to the voice, data, video, and telecommunication pipe. Then we standardized it, and then we gave it as a gift to the world to use. And as I told you, I provided my technology royalty-free and in this nature not collecting any money in any nature. So if you look at that, that's the story of American apple pie.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:24:19) American apple pie is a recipe we created, people love it, and everybody eats it around the world. And I thought the story of the broadband needed to be told. The story of the broadband and the impact it has on economy, the impact it has on the global humanity, the impact it has on health care, education, the way the government runs their business. I wrote a book around 2003 called Planet Broadband, and I listed at that time 83 different services and applications that broadband would enable.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:24:52) And everybody said, why would anybody want to do those applications and services? And guess what? All of them are now very simplistically being used every single time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:05) Now, in those four pillars, is there a way... Do you cover all this ability to see the waves, like the difference between hype and reality on new technologies? Is that in there, or is that...

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:25:19) No. No. And that's what I do and I love to do with my interviews. I go to universities and speak. I go to the mentorship of the startups, and I share them with them.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:25:33) But because we are such a dynamic... For example, look at the broadband infrastructure. Broadband infrastructure now is one of the key fundamental pieces of the AI revolution. If you really didn't have high-speed broadband connectivity, how would you have different experiences, different users around the globe to actually be able to train these models? It's because of the access to the broadband that training these models has become more practical and more realistic and more educational that captures a lot of variety of information there. So I love to speak and I go around and do as many as I can to answer the specific question that you ask.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:26:17) And I will add the flavors depending if it's AI, depending if it's the digital sensors that need to be used or quantum computing, which are really three major elements that are revolutionizing the world that you and I are living in now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:32) Yeah. I didn't even think about broadband's impact on AI. Yeah. There's the connectivity today, but there's also the past 20, 30 years of the technology existing so people adopted it. People could publish more. It could collect more information as a network as a whole so that when the technology to train models comes about, there's a huge dataset. So it kind of all works together, which is beautiful.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:27:00) Right. In fact, if you go to my other website, which is my technical website, yas.com, if you go there, you'll see there's an article there that we just put up as well. If you look at my technology originally back in 1996, we had 10 megabits over six megahertz. That's what the standard cable TV channel was. And now on the same infrastructure, we are putting almost 10 gigabits in the frequency spectrum to come, all because of the technology.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:27:28) And we created a chart that shows how the evolution of the high-speed data has been. I mean, you know better than I do that 20 years ago, we didn't even have one gigabyte to the National Science Foundation. And now speed has come so far, so fast, and the prices are so reasonable that almost every household can afford to have this type of thing. Yet in America, we've got about 30 million people not connected, which really bothers me.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:27:56) And I'm hoping before my days are over, we will have someone in government really put top priority. Maybe even President Trump has signed an executive order that says, "Hey, we'd like to have broadband connectivity for all Americans." And then he will be the next president. And just like Eisenhower did with the highway system, he will get credit for bringing the ubiquity of the broadband to every home.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:21) Yeah. Are you a fan of Starlink?

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:28:24) I'm very much... At this point in my career, I'm a fan of any broadband methodology that gets to people's homes. Satellite is one way. Fiber from the phone companies is another way. The cable industry has a way. The fixed wireless is another one. And the power companies have a way to be able to do that. So as long as Americans get their broadband, it's good with me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:49) I saw my first Starlink deployment on a walk, like, two nights ago.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:28:54) Good for you. How did you like it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:55) It was... I saw it, and then I was like, where have I seen this before? Because I had seen a picture and an article of it before online. I'd never seen it in person, and I was walking. And it was just... You could see it for about two or three minutes. And we were out with our neighbors. We were walking with the kids and the dogs and everything, and I'm like, "Look. There it is." It was magnificent, man. It made me feel like I'm a part of this better future. Yeah.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:29:20) We are really lucky. I tell you, in America, we are blessed to have all this high-speed connectivity at very reasonable pricing and allow the people to do what broadband did, Joel, that made every consumer of information at home to be a producer. Look at all these influential people. Look at all the way that people are now creating jobs at their home and being able to contribute to our economy.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:29:50) I mean, almost $2.6 trillion of our GDP comes from broadband and broadband-enabled services, and it's really remarkable.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:59) Well, it's been my primary source of income for about 10 years, just through this podcast. And before that, it was me using broadband to work remotely to write software applications. And so...

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:30:12) There you go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:12) I've spent... I'm 38. I've spent my entire life earning money through broadband, high-speed Internet engagements in various forms. Yeah.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:30:23) This truly has revolutionized the way we work, live, and communicate. And one of the impacts of the broadband... I have so many examples to tell you, and I won't bore you with that. I went to Toyota City, 400 kilometers north of Tokyo, and there were people who recognized who I was. This was at the time when I traveled in 1995, and they said, "Oh, Mr. Yassini, we are using your cable modem here to connect from the rice field to the Toyota office." And it was really refreshing to see how far the technology has allowed people immediate access.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:31:04) I call it anything, anywhere, anytime. Now it used to be a person comes to the Western world, gets educated, and by the time they get a job and experience, it takes 20 years before that person goes back to his own culture or in those countries to contribute what he has learned. Now that thing happens instantaneously. Right? Instantaneously.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:27) You just live stream it. Okay. There's a million questions I could ask you about these conversations that you're having at colleges, these speeches that you're giving about hype and reality and the gap. But there's really only one that I think would help me understand what's going on there. So my question for you is, when you're giving these talks about the gap between hype and reality and the technology waves at the colleges, I'm sure it's 30 minutes to an hour-long time, but there's got to be one point where you see those students really lean in and that you really have that one really strong point that captures their attention. What is that?

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:32:13) You know, Joel, I'll tell you exactly what that is. Every time that I start a conversation and we share with them how the innovation works, entrepreneurship works, I also remind them that remember, 98, 99% of the startup companies always fail. Why is that? Well, the majority of those failed companies are the ones that keep doing PowerPoints and keep doing with the papers what this idea or vision that they have does. I tell them, instead of spending all your time and efforts and money there, be among that 1% person.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:32:49) Build a prototype. Build the MVP, minimum viable product. Let the product do the talking. Take that to a first customer that you believe can really utilize that product in the most effective way.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:33:04) So build your prototype, take it to a customer, let the product do the talking, and bring that energy back to your team and develop the lower cost, better packaged version of that, and you'll be a success. If you look at all the good companies, look at Apple, for example. How did Apple get started? Look at Netflix. Look at Google.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:33:29) All these were sitting in a garage or a small home and created a technology or product that did something first, and then they went and talked with the others. That's where I see the people's eyeballs go right up, and they say, "Oh, yeah. Maybe the product can do a better job than a PowerPoint." And I think the success story is really written on that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:54) Do they... Have you ever gotten into talking with them about how to interview people for problems or how to discover problems that are worth building a solution for?

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:34:03) I have always mentioned to the students and entrepreneurs that failure is your friend. What that really means: you learn from the thing that failed. You learn from the bad story. I learned so many things in my cable modem because residential cable TV used to be known as a source system that you put good things in it and bad things come out of it. Right?

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:34:26) That's what the university professor used to say. But when I took my technology to multiple different cable sites and tested it and found this issue, I could be scared and say, "Oh, I failed," or I could come back and try to solve that. And I always take my engineers with me and let them hear from the customer, let them see the problem. And that was a really effective way.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:34:49) That made the ownership of the problem a lot faster and resolution to it even faster. So the bottom line is the failures are good friends of ours and teach us many things. And as long as you identify a known problem and you think you have a nice gadget or nice jewel that solves that problem and you're not afraid of the failures, you have nothing to lose in the startup company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:17) I love that. That is great advice. AI, big thing right now, huge transformative technology that's occurring all around us. Do you think we're in a bubble? Do you think it's like, where do you think we're at in that cycle?

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:35:31) So AI has a lot of great benefit. AI can help the medical field. AI can help education. And the AI infrastructure is not there yet. The AI chips are there from NVIDIA, AMD, Broadcom, and all the others, but the infrastructure, end-to-end system, end-to-end qualification and diagnostic and testability, end-to-end performance, what you and I used to call bit error rate, for example, for high-speed data, the equivalent of those doesn't exist for AI.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:36:03) Or if it exists, it's not really publicized yet. And so those parts need to come together before a full AI end-to-end can be tested. Those who think we're gonna have superhuman six months from now or nine months from now, they're hyping. It's not gonna happen in six to nine months because infrastructure is not there.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:36:24) Those who think we can get our AI model, we can build a diagnostic, we can build a test plan, we can build calibration and quality evaluations around it, we can build some standards to decide if the AI is really doing the right things or the wrong things, those are on the right track. So depending which direction the people want to take the AI, if they wanna hype it, you can hype it. If you wanna build the infrastructure, build a better quality AI, we are in that path in my view, which is very helpful. And then there's a third part to make sure the training of these models is done in a manner that is not biased by one company or another company. Instead, it's more what I call having collective feedback of the university professors or the customers, the people in different countries, and so on and so forth.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:37:17) Because how sad would it be if European guys create their own training model and the U.S. does their own training model? There's gotta be some collaboration, right, on that nature. So will it be a bubble? I'll leave that to the financial guys and the stock market to decide. But is the AI a good thing?

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:37:34) AI is a great thing if and only if it's fully tested and fully valued before it comes to market. I'll teach you one thing, Joel. Internet did one thing bad for the consumer. Before Internet, you used to have the companies that build the product, test the product completely, ship your hardware and software in a functional unit. After Internet, the people and the companies said, "You know what?"

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:38:00) "Just ship the hardware. And then a couple months later when the customers get the hardware, we will ship the software, load it on it, let the customer test to see if this stuff works or doesn't work." Right? And you and I have been on the receiving end, you know, because by the time they ship the product to the warehouse, from the warehouse it goes to an Amazon lookalike, by the time you order it, you get it, it's four, five, six, seven months.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:38:25) Right? So they were using that payload to develop the software that makes that piece of hardware, which was dead at the time of shipment, functional. Well, I hope AI doesn't do that. It would be very sad to ship these models and then say we're gonna parachute in the software somehow and the model will work because the side effects could be dangerous. Right?

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:38:50) The side effects of those could be dangerous. So I'm one of those old-fashioned engineers that says at the board level in the AI companies, at the executive level, at the operational level, at the development level, we need to have very nice end-to-end, what we call a group of highly unbiased people to validate, test, qualify this AI stuff before it gets published.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:18) Are you using any AIs, like, on a day-to-day basis?

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:39:22) I do that, of course. And I do it for one main reason. In a certain area, I'm a subject matter expert, and I try to use it to see how real these models are. And I have to tell you so far, I haven't found one that is that accurate that replaced me as a human being. At least not today, maybe tomorrow.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:39:41) Can't replace you. You're the father of the cable modem. You know, come on. It's not replaceable, but that's my way of testing that model to see if it really works.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:39:49) Right? If it really does things because I know in depth certain materials and the AI model has not been able to do that for me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:58) So you are playing with the technology?

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:40:00) Yes, of course.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:01) Awesome. Yeah. You'd be surprised at how many people I talk with that they're not playing with it, like, in their personal lives. Like, they'll use it at work or they'll run a project, they'll have an AI initiative. But I found that, and I kinda steered away from it for a while too even being so involved with the technology world. I'd say about a year ago is when I picked it up and it's become part of an everyday thing for me now. Like, I'll often go to Grok before I even go to Google.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:40:32) And, you know, one area is that sometimes the new technology is intimidating, sometimes it scares people. But I always tell the people on the AI side, especially the university students, don't try to use AI in a way that you're not comfortable with. Ask AI and use AI in a way that if you wanna innovate or if you want to do process automation to see how it will help you to do that better. Because if you learn about AI and the capability of AI and what it does, you are now more powerful to be useful, for example. Pick up a construction company. Pick up a hairdressing company.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:41:15) Pick up a uniform company. Pick up a construction company. If I know of AI and how to apply AI, then I can go to those companies and say, "Hey, this piece of your company could do a better job with this type of simplification or this type of automation or this type of mathematical analysis in a lot faster, cheaper way."

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:41:39) Even painting your house, you know, you can come up with what I call a model to be able to assist and get those things done. So if you focus on those areas, then you naturally adopt AI to do something useful for you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:56) I wanna talk a little bit about leadership for the CTOs and technology leaders that are listening. So shrinking the cycle between hype and delivery, that's a core skill of a CTO. Right? It's a critical role that they play. They don't always get credit for it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:14) But could you explain a little bit more about what that means, shrinking the cycle between hype and delivery?

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:42:20) Yeah. So, you know, let me give you a real example. In my case, when I had the vision in 1987, we built a prototype. And then from prototype, I made a business cable modem and then made a personal cable modem. I could have, when I made a prototype, I could have made a quick decision to shrink the timeline and run to the market as fast as possible, but I didn't because I wanted to build the features and the functions that I thought would be essential in my technology that could last for years of my life and work.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:42:52) So instead of just shrinking things, we reinvented the technology, rebuilt it, and made it in a manner that 10 megabits of 1996 can be 10 gigabits of today. That cycle took nine years because we had to use old-fashioned analog components to build, and then we had to go half analog, half digital, then full siliconization and software development to get them. Thanks to a number of the tools in our toolbox these days, now you can go from innovation to a product in eighteen months or twelve months or nine months, pending. If you are not biased by saying I have to invent everything by myself, I have to invent everything in my department or my office.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:43:36) So depending on the type of product or form of the product, for example, in the car industry, it still takes four years for a car to get manufactured and designed and come out there. However, in the case of the app and in the case of the mobility devices, you could do this in thirty days to sixty days because white box hardware can be used very quickly to be able to do that. So my advice to CTOs on product development and hype to reality is that you scope your product to see where it fits and use a strict set of tools and software and services that are available, and then focus on the real core jewel that makes sense for you and expedite the delivery. Today, I can tell you that development of a product that takes two years to four years is not even financeable anymore because no venture capitalist wants to be around that. However, the quality matters and the quality makes a difference.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:44:44) Size makes a difference, and we have learned from a number of companies how they have done a good job on industrial design and things of that nature. Because we are in a software world now and because software has a lot of power where it used to not have as much, and because software can run on generic hardware, look at routing, for example, that was invented by Juniper, Cisco, and all the other companies. Now you can almost do your own routers by just getting hardware and getting off-the-shelf open-source code and putting them all together. Right?

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:45:17) The idea comes to validation and qualification. So put your effort in automation, put your effort on software validation, and put your effort in minimum viable product that you wanna make sense and do your best. And between nine months to fifteen months, you should be able to do a very sophisticated product to the market these days.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:39) Are you still doing advisory stuff, or have you just retired completely from that and you're just on the foundation now?

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:45:45) I do advisory for friends and colleagues that I'm still connected with. One thing has changed, Joel. In our time, thirty years ago, forty years ago, we had a lot of great trust. You know, people work together, trust each other, and help. But with today's generation of the entrepreneurs and the valuing, that trust is really not much there.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:46:09) I don't feel it there. Therefore, I'm not excited as much to, um, is everything about the money? Is everything about billions, not even millions anymore? Right? In my era, I was very excited to connect billions of people to high-speed data, not to be a billionaire.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:46:26) But today, people are really excited. "Oh, I got a valuation of X billions, and we raised that billion." It's really all measured with the money and not what are you making impact to the society, to the humanity, to the planet Earth, and those are really less valued. So I'm an old-fashioned guy. As a result, it's harder for me to get motivated to work with some of these people who are just financially interested in winning big and winning fast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:58) Yeah. I don't know. I've always kind of been, I've gone through different phases. I would say in my early twenties, I was like that. And then I realized that you don't need that much to have a great life.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:09) Like, to have an unbelievable life, you don't need that. You don't need billions. You don't need hundreds of millions. Like, you can have a great life with a lot less than what I initially thought in my early twenties. And once I realized that, I started to value time more.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:24) I would hear these people who are farther ahead of me in life say, "I would give up all of my money and everything just to be 30 again." And I said, "Okay. Well, I keep hearing that and I keep hearing it a lot." So that caused me to switch my perspective to looking at time as the most valuable commodity over money. And, yes, you have to have a certain floor, like, a certain level of money to live in the Maslow's hierarchy of needs where you need to be.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:49) But valuing time differently is something that changed in my thirties.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:47:54) You are very wise, Joel, and I wish that people would be able to get to your point at age 30, at age 20 and 18, and when they start entrepreneurship. Because, you know, we only got one planet Earth that we know the life the way you and I feel about it exists. The air pollution, the water pollution are real stuff. They are not imaginary. So we have to be really conscious about what we're developing, how much noise we're putting into the system, and what's the noise-to-signal ratio that is creating, or the signal-to-noise ratio here.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:48:30) So if you don't really have the perspective on reality of, does my contribution help planet Earth? Does it help humanity? And yes, does it follow capitalism, which is the best system, you know, in the world that works? Does it have that spirit?

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:48:45) But if we put the priorities in the right way, I think humanity is gonna be much more in ease and better off in the near future because it's not the number of apps in the App Store that makes our life better. It's the number of healthy people who can live longer and enjoy the beauty of planet Earth with less stress and more quality time with their families and their friends that builds a community so that our children are better off after us. And that's really what should be the essence, which I think is missing in some of the entrepreneurs these days.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:24) It is. But I do have hope because a lot of people that I'm around, they really genuinely wanna make life better. And so they do it through, by using capitalism. You know, wealth is a byproduct of making life better for other people at scale. So they do it, you know, from that aspect.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:44) But, yeah, there's always some not great people hanging around out there. My job, what I have learned is to, I create my own echo chamber of great people.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:49:56) Good for you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:57) I'm like, I'm gonna stay around these great people who are doing what I believe is the right thing to do, who have moral systems that are similar to mine. And that's the current strategy that I'm using.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:50:08) For example, Joel, cancer detection, one of the deadliest diseases we have against humanity, and part of it is because of the bad food that we eat, part of it is because of bad air, part of it is because of genetics. So there is a lot of technology available to us to help do cancer detection and do it right. You know? And I'm looking forward to really seeing the technology, innovation, entrepreneurship used to solve this type of problem. And I'm a very strong supporter of capitalism.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:50:40) I love capitalism. As you said, it's an excellent way to reward entrepreneurs, but we are hoping to be able to put them in balance with each other.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:49) What are you doing with cancer detection?

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:50:51) Well, you know, there are a number of companies that I work with and a number of universities and hospitals I fund research and stuff. And pancreatic cancer is very close to my heart. I have lost family members to that, and I hope to be able to make a dent in that somehow with detection. And so there are some photonic technologies being used around high-tech stuff, but you can actually use photonics to sample the blood test a lot faster with a lot more patterns. Then you bring the AI into it that says a protein made by cancers can look like this. And if you sample blood faster, does this protein look like that?

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:51:37) And by doing that, you might be able to detect certain cancers a lot faster. And like in case of pancreatic cancers, it's very difficult. If you don't detect it early, you know, it's really too late to respond to it. So two, three, four months can make a matter of life and death.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:51:54) You know? And so I'll focus on some of that area.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:58) That's interesting. And so you're helping, like, fund newer technologies for earlier detection? Yes. That's pretty cool. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:07) I lost my mom to leukemia. She had a stomachache. She went into the hospital, and they said within—they found out that she had leukemia, and they're like, well, she should, you know, with treatment and stuff, should be like five years or so. And we said, okay. And she was gone six weeks later.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:23) So wow. Yeah.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:52:25) That's exactly the story with the pancreatic cancer. By the time they detect it, within a matter of a few weeks.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:32) Let's wrap up on some leadership advice. This is one of my favorite questions that I have. But I'm gonna ask you for a piece of leadership advice, but there's going to be constraints. And the constraints are, it's something someone told you. You implemented it. It made a noticeable impact on your management leadership, and you've kept it in your repertoire to today. So like a time-tested true piece of advice that you have actual experience with.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:53:02) So, you know, I had very great mentors in General Electric when I was learning my career experience. And I noticed all those elder managers never expected me to do something that they would not do by themselves. So I learned from those managers that before you go ask an employee to do something, you better be able to do it by yourself and be shoulder by shoulder with them to do. So I took that to heart. And when I created my startup, I was a hands-on manager, which means I would go to the engineering bench. I would go into marketing. I'd go to sales. I'd go to finance and do exactly what those guys were doing to show them that I'm at the same level as they are. That helped me to build my comrades in a very trusted way. And instead of then asking them, let's do this, let's do that, why don't you do it this way, why don't you do it that way, we would always collaborate.

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:53:59) So the combination of having hands-on and also contributing to what they were doing daily as well as trusting them that they know more details better than me—my leadership skills was in that. Hands-on management, which means trust them, validate the approach that they have, and work with them to get their style done. And as a result, all the engineers, all the marketing, all the sales people that were working with me loved my style because they were looking at me almost as a fatherly figure versus a managerial figure. I never told them, hey, I'm the president. I'm the CEO. I'm the founder. You gotta do what I tell you. Not once. And I think that brought a lot of credibility when we were in the foxhole together and had hard times to do, which are a couple of the things that my book captures in some of the critical areas. So I trust my staff, and I was hands-on with them. And that combination of being able to show them that we're in the same foxhole helped a lot.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:07) I love that, Rouzbeh. Well, we made a podcast. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing all of this great insight. How do you feel?

(Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard at 00:55:15) I love it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:16) 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'd 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.