 Welcome to JSA TV, the newsroom for tech and telecom professionals. I'm Jamie Scott-Okataya of JSA, and we're here at the Channel Partners Evolution Show at the Chorus Communications Lounge with my friend Mr. Mike Egbert. He's the Director of Sales for Pilot Fiber. Mike, welcome to JSA TV. Thank you for having me. Appreciate that. Oh, it's a pleasure. And for sure, I feel like there's a buzz about Pilot Fiber. For our viewers who may not already know, let's start there. Tell us a little bit about Pilot Fiber. Sure. You know, when we started the company four and a half years ago, you know, we looked around our market, which was New York City, and we noticed a few things, some pain points that existed in the telecom landscape. We saw that even in a city like New York City that was so connected in terms of technology and you would think that there's fiber available everywhere, there were actually a lot of gaps and hundreds of buildings, therefore thousands of companies that didn't have access to dedicated SLA-backed fiber services. And if you could get those services, a lot of times they were out of your price range as like a small company, a nonprofit, even some mid-sized companies. And if you could afford them as a company, a lot of times there was a headache in procuring those services, you know, lengthy contract terms to negotiate, not a lot of transparency in terms of bringing fiber into the building and into the suite. And we decided to kind of turn that on its head. Yeah, well, as a girl who started her telecom career in New York, you are singing my song. I will say that. Now I noticed on your website you called it a modern connectivity company, and I thought that was a really interesting phrase there. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Yeah, absolutely. For us, a modern connectivity company is a company that connects companies to the content on the internet that they need to get to, to their other locations, their data center and COLO environments, and their cloud environments as more and more moves to the cloud. The modern piece to that is two-fold. It's innovative software and technology, and it's forward-thinking business practices and internal processes. So the physical connectivity piece, obviously, is the products that we offer. It's dedicated internet. It's direct connect to get you to other locations in your data centers, and it's cloud connect to get you to your cloud environment. But we know that connectivity goes a lot deeper than that, and at the end of the day, we know that we are connecting our customers to their customers. We're connecting them to their mission and vision, and that allows them to go farther. That allows them to do what they do best. And so us providing that underlying piece is what really allows them to do that. I love that. We talk so much about network and network infrastructure and connectivity on a very physical layer, but when we connect it to clients and the people, the human connection, that's where you've got something. So I love that. I love that. And that speaks true to a great segue into my next question, because you mentioned you were, for, pilot fiber has been around for four years, and through that has been exponential growth. So tell us, what do you attribute that growth to? Yeah, you know, I think there's a lot I mentioned at the beginning that we saw those pain points that existed in the marketplace, and one of the reasons we've grown so quickly is we actually address those pain points. So we've brought fiber to hundreds of buildings that were previously underserved. We've brought competition into our market so that nonprofits and small businesses could actually access those services at an affordable rate. And we've solved a lot of those pain points for procuring those services. That's things like no annual contracts, pricing that's straightforward, publicly available, and doesn't change its flat rate, and so you know you're getting the best deal. You know, all in all, though, I think the thing that really made us grow in the last four years is our people, to be honest with you. When you look around at pilot and at the people at pilot, you see passionate individuals that love to go to work, want to be there every day, solving problems for our customers, are highly customer centric, they're on the mission, they know that what's ahead of them is a really good mission, and me as the head of sales, it's awesome to look around at my team and see that they get so fired up by looking at their teammates and seeing that they're out there building a company that is truly providing an awesome customer experience. I've got to back that up. The folks that I've met, especially here at Channel Partners from Pilot Fiber, they have been emanating this certain focus and responsiveness, and you definitely have people power, if you will, so congratulations there. Appreciate that, thank you. And one thing, again, on your website that I had noticed was the word innovation kept popping up, and especially in terms of the Pilot Fiber, the four-year growth story, how do you plan to continue innovating in the next year or two ahead? Yeah, good question. From the outset, we really invested in builders and innovators. From day one, we had a software development team in-house that we could build customer-facing and internal software and apps. Actually, we just released something into beta recently, which is cool, which is a customer app, puts into our customer's hands the ability to speak with our account management team, to talk to network support, to look at the status of their service, and we're going to be adding more features to that like buying and provisioning services over that app, checking your Wi-Fi status, being able to look at your usage and metrics and statistics. We're also excited about rolling out live fiber monitoring across our backbone in New York City, and that's there so that we can be more reliable. We can get to the scene more quickly if there's an issue with our fiber in the street. It means faster response times, better backing up of our SLA at the end of the day. And we just actually made a great hire on the product side. We brought a guy named Aaron Welch onto the team as our VP of product. He was formerly at a company called Packet. And so he joins us to really see what's next, to see what the roadmap is for putting more into our customer's hands, giving them more power, really evolving with them as their business needs evolve and change. So for us, innovation is everything. We want to constantly be iterating, and we invest heavily in that. Couldn't agree more. Innovation is everything. Pilot Fiber seems to be where it's at. Where can our viewers who want to learn more find out? PilotFiber.com, a great website, a lot of information on there, and would love you to take a visit. PilotFiber.com, there you have it. Thank you, Mike, for joining us. And thank you, viewers, for tuning in to JSA TV. Happy networking.