 Live from the JSA Podcast Studio, presenting Data Movers, showcasing the leaders behind the headlines in the telecom and data center infrastructure industry. Hey everybody, welcome to our new podcast series, Data Movers. My name is Jamie Scott-O-Cutaya, founder and CEO of JSA. And along with me is my fabulous co-host, top B2B social media influencer, Mr. Evan Kirstel. Good morning Evan. Hey Jamie, good to see you. And we call ourselves new. I mean, we've been at it a year and we're by and far the biggest, and I'd say only podcast in telecom and data center. But what shows you how niche our niche is. But thanks to listening and joining and where we sit down with the most influential men and women of today's leading telco and data center world supporting the infrastructure requirements of this new normal. So Jamie, we're filming actually a little bit before Christmas. So happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, happy Kwanzaa, happy holidays, whatever I've missed. But what's your favorite sort of holiday tradition? Yeah, happy everything, right? Well, so many favorites. I mean, I've loved this time of year. I'm like Christmas crazy. Like I just, I love this time of year. But last night I threw a little party, a little get together for some of my mom friends in my neighborhood. And we did a white elephant gift exchange. I don't know if you've ever been familiar, but basically a person opens a gift in the center. Everyone brings a gift, someone just randomly opens up a gift and then the next person that goes, they can either open that gift or steal from the gift that's already been open. So you go around the circle, everyone puts number one through 10 and the person at the end basically can steal whatever gift they want. So it gets a bit vicious. It's so- This sounds treacherous. This sounds like a brutal. Yeah, you're like clinging to your gift if you like it. Like a very nerve wracking and remind me never to come to one of your white elephant parties. But I just like sitting around the fire. I'm a sucker for a good old fashioned real fireplace. Not the gas kind, the kind with the soot and the smell and the ashes like the old days and just getting slowly drunk in front of the fireplace. So, but let's get on to some other hot news. Speaking of fire, we have an amazing guest. And you know guys, data movers, we've been very blessed to get the best of the best guests here on data movers. And today, no difference. We've got the fabulous Justin Marin, CEO of strategic venue partners joining us. Justin, welcome, welcome. Thank you for having me. I greatly appreciate it. I don't know about the best of the best, but I'll do my best to give you a perspective coming to you from our new offices in Greenwich, which literally new offices. So you can, it looks like I'm in an insane asylum with nothing behind me, but like walls and empty desks. But you can't see all the boxes that are over here in our new office space. So other than my plant making it in and my fake chagall, that's about as far as we have right now. As far as unpacking is concerned. I like a man who prioritized it well. Greenwich, Connecticut, beautiful city. You see it, you know, when taking the train in from Boston to New York City. Is it true Greenwich, the streets are paved with gold? Yes, actually that's, it's very true. There's tons of potholes because people are constantly trying to dig out the gold. They can take it home with them. So your tires take a beating here for sure. And traffic's a bit. That's right. But you didn't grow up in Connecticut. Where are you from originally? Where did you go to school? Where did you grow up? Yeah, I grew up in New Jersey, which has a lovely stigmatism against it. I grew up in New Jersey right outside the city. I've lived all around the world effectively, but Connecticut's been my home state for the past 20 years or so. Although if you're from New Jersey, getting rid of your Jersey roots is very difficult. Because even though I've lived here for 20 years, you know, my, my cell phone is still a 973 number, which everybody makes fun of me, which is a North New Jersey area code. They're like, why won't you adopt the fact that you lived in Connecticut and own places over the past and work here? And I try and explain to them that outside of the Jersey shore, which none of those people are from New Jersey just for the record, I believe. You know, it's something that you don't want to get rid of if that's where you're from. Fun fact, I started JSA 17 years ago almost in Hoboken. Oh, there you go. And I still have my East Coast area code. I import it wherever, you know, I mean, someone who knew me 20 years ago might want to follow me and I want to have the right number in Israel, right? Exactly right. Well, I know all about New Jersey. I watched the many saints of Newark recently. So I have the whole history. But what, you know, Justin, what's one favorite memory of yours growing up in the garden state? What do you look back on fondly? Yeah, that's a good question. You know, I hate to harp on it again, but if you're, I was from North New Jersey and believe it or not, the Jersey shore, again, outside of the TV show, there are parts of it. They're just gorgeous, right? And I remember growing up there, going to the beach surfing as a kid. And it was just, it's something that doesn't leave you. There's something more, you know, beautiful about it. And again, people drive down the turnpike, mostly, you know, and they see all the crap in New Jersey, but they don't get to see the beautiful parts of it and part of that's a shore for sure. Yeah, it really is. So when you were a kid staring out at the beautiful beach, did you have a dream job or idea of what you'd like to become? 100%. You know, I wanted to become that and tied to many visits to SeaWorld as a child. I wanted to become a marine biologist. My father's no longer with me for quite some time. Reminded me that it's extremely hard work, a lot of education to make no money, you know? And so I was quickly, you know, after growing up a little bit, you know, a disillusioned with that idea and went in a different direction. Well, good choice. And I was really excited actually to speak with you today because I'm a wireless infrastructure and networking fanatic myself. In fact, I was so excited about the vaccine. I asked for 5G to be put specifically in my, in my vaccine because it's wireless, but you've had an interesting career, a transition into wireless coming from finance into the energy sector, which has a lot of similarity to the wireless networking space. So tell us about that journey. How did you go from one sort of segment to the next? Yeah, kind of school, you know, in the late 90s, 99, 2000, I spent a year in the city doing that and the joke was always if the windows opened, I would have jumped out. And, you know, and I saw the need, so from finance we went into towers. And really the motivation there was, I wanted to be in the real estate business. I wanted to be in the reoccurring cash flow business. And at the time you just, you couldn't compete, you know, this is pre-explosion of REITs everywhere. And so I really wanted to be in the commercial, you know, commercial mall business. And you just couldn't compete, right? If you wanted to move to North Carolina or South, I mean the Northeast, you know, and or on the West Coast. I could have, I guess, moved to South Carolina and started buying malls and doing that type of work. I didn't want to do that. And, you know, the thought at the time was wireless phones are taking off. As a side note, I had a fraternity brother whom I loved and his parents were both neurosurgeons. And I remember being in college and this kid had a cell phone. And I was like, who are you? Like when growing up, the most important people would have cell phones, right? Like doctors, police, et cetera, politicians, I'm sure. And I was like, nobody needs to hear from you, right? Like you are the least important person in the whole world. Why do you have a cell phone? And his parents gave it to him because they wanted to get in touch with him. And like the ideas are during my head, like, if this idiot, again, who I love has a cell phone, you know, more people are gonna have cell phones, right? And you start thinking about like just connectivity. And then it's like, okay, well, if he has one, then you're gonna want to give one to your parents. And then, you know, and then parents are gonna want to have it for their kids and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so the idea started snowballing from there. And then, you know, we went out and built a bunch of cell towers and started providing solutions to the carriers then. Still have some of those sites. You know, we sold a bit off and used those monies to go into the renewables areas. And you had said that, you know, there's a crossover and there really is, you know, from building a cell tower to a wind turbine, it's very similar. You know, the only difference is the size of the case-ons, right? As opposed to propagating wireless signals, you're selling power. And so instead of having, you know, an agreement with Verizon to propagate a signal, you have a power purchase agreement, right? To sell power back into the grid at that side. And we're following the tax incentive dollars. You know, at this point in time, mid-2000s towers were going great. I mean, wind was going crazy, predominantly in the Midwest through the Southwest and parts of the Northwest at the time through Southeast California. And so we were kind of on the forefront of that and doing things like, I guess, if there's a concept behind what we've done, it's always, you know, water ski behind oil tankers, right? And I'll get into that like what we do in wireless, but what I mean by that is, you had these large organizations that were building massive amounts of infrastructure, but nobody was kind of doing the middle market in smaller type of build-outs. And so we focused on that and really started building up systems there. Same thing happened with solar. I mean, we sold off that and moved into solar. And again, at the time, folks and companies were focused on building two, $300 million type of solar plants. Nobody was looking at 10 to $100 million type of solar plants and or distributed generation behind the meter type of stuff. And so that's kind of the solution we started providing there and that was successful. And then, of course, found our way into wireless. And there's so many similarities along the way that we'll get into on the call, but that was part of that trajectory of how to get here. You have like a magic vision. You can predict where the tide is turning. It's brilliant. What was your aha moment when you decided to leave energy for wireless infrastructure investment and development at your current firm strategic venue partners, SDP? Yeah, again, the thought was, you know, a couple of things. One, how do we solve problems? Where's the opportunity? How do you compete against, again, large oil tankers, right? And so you can't compete against American Tower, Crown Castle, the public companies, even what Mark Gansey was building it, you know, pre-digital colony, I guess now. And so their cost of capital is what it is. We're not going to go out and buy cell towers, right? I mean, it's not a profitable space if you're like us in our size. And the thought was all this infrastructure had to be built out in the enterprise market, right? What I mean by that is real estate, healthcare, malls, not necessarily airports or stadiums where it is still needing to be built out, but it was really in this other area. And when you think about providing a solution, you know, the wireless carriers are highly focused on the highest foot traffic areas. But then if you, and they're willing to pay to be in those areas. But then if you take a step back and you say, I'm looking on my window at a bunch of different offices here, and you say, these guys need connectivity just like a stadium does, right? There's no difference. The question is, how do you provide them that type of solution? And what's the right way to prosecute that type of concept? And so we launched SVP with that in mind, started off with like, we have the right idea. Everybody said it can't be done the way we're doing it. And so when you have the right idea, you need just to be persistent and keep following that right idea to then make it successful. I'm kind of proving everybody wrong. And you have a window to do that as far as timing and your capital and everything else. And I don't know if I have a crystal ball in my head, and I'm sure a lot of it's luck along the way. But we've done it and we've done it pretty well so far. Love the mission. That's really fantastic. We're actually recording this on a 5G connection. I'm in a big Hilton hotel chain and tremendous 5G coverage, ultra high speed 5G. They must have some kind of in building wireless service. So that's just a fantastic opportunity that seems to cross hospitality as well as healthcare and retail and other places. So to tell us more about SVP's mission of disruption, that's a heavy challenge given the wireless sector today. So what's your perspective as a smaller nimble player out in this market? That's just it. I hate to keep going back to the oil tanker analogy. And I'm not smart enough to think of another one, honestly, but the thought is oil tankers can't pivot quickly, right? I mean, they do what they do. And we kind of water ski off of their wake and say they throw off enough weight. There's so much business out there to be done. And so when we thought about our solutions, it was like, how do we provide the proper solution to help somebody? And that's really the genesis of SVP and how we think about it. And we start from there, right? Like how do we fix this problem? What's the right way to do it? How to get everybody's interests aligned, right? Like you alluded to the fact that you're in a hotel. Again, they need the connectivity no different than the airport you said you're in DC, right? So Reagan, Dallas, they need the same connectivity as the hotel you're in, as the business down the road you're in, but they all come at it from a different perspective. And we're sick and tired of crappy wifi that we pay 15 bucks a night for when you have this amazing 5G spectrum that's just out there and available. Absolutely. And so part of our platform is a little bit of a secret sauce. So I don't want to give away all of our secrets to you. Oh, come on. Give it all. It's in data movers. But I think there's a ton of growth in this space. That's what we're hyper-focused on. There's a ton of room for everybody in it. That's for sure. A lot of folks are moving up and down that ladder where you see companies going after the larger type of portfolios and these are the large guys trying to come down to what we call the enterprise market where you can consolidate about a bunch of assets. But we're happy with what we're doing and our goal is to continue doing this. That's somewhat off the radar even though I'm on a podcast right now. Well, and can you explain to our listeners what it took to bring your vision to reality and what it means to you and your customers? Yeah, yeah. So it took us launching it, taking the rest of ourselves. My partners and I pushed the money forward, built the business that way. And then really we had the right sponsors. When we got to a certain critical mass, Tiger Infrastructure Partners, who are our sponsors, really smart guys, they saw the opportunity the way we saw it and they believed in us and they backed us really from the onset. And so that's great, right? When you have people that are willing to say, okay, we get it, we see your vision, we know there's a ton of risk involved, we believe in the team and we'll help you get there. But we also believe in the opportunity, right? And so that's kind of where the launching side came from. Yeah, we hear so many great things about Tiger. Yeah. Yeah, awesome, great guys. Fantastic. Yeah, I'd love to do, we don't have time today, but I'd love to do a deep dive on the technology front. I followed the CBRS private 5G networking space and it's such an amazing opportunity. Maybe we could do a part two with your technology experts. But from the CEO perspective at SVP, what does the future look like to you? I hate to ask for five year predictions because invariably we can't think a year or two ahead, much less than five, but what is your long-term perspective on the industry and where it's going? Yeah, touch on what you started off with the CBRS, right? And we could definitely do the deep dive there. We're in that space too, right? We have the largest CBRS system, I think in the country. Wow. It's at a large brand new casino in Las Vegas called Resortral Las Vegas. I think there's something to that, right? I think it's, and it's kind of like the, I explained to people, it's kind of like the internet in 2000, you know, where everybody's like, this thing's cool. We don't know how we're gonna make money off it yet, but everybody's rushing into it, you know? And so I think there'll be a model in CBRS and there are those out there that are a lot smarter than me that can talk on that and certainly within my firm and be happy to do that. I think from a five year perspective, there just needs to be so much infrastructure built out, specifically on the end building side, right? So right now the carriers are really focused, head down, focused on building up their macro networks. But the reality is, you know, 80 plus percent of calls originate indoors, right? And those are calls. Forget about all the data and everything else that goes through there. So there's an area that they're not focused on yet. They, I mean, they know it's real, right? And so they only could do things in stages. And so we're trying to build out that type of infrastructure and bring them in with us as we move along. But I think there's just a tremendous runway in this enterprise space, especially for wireless connectivity and part of that's BAS and part of that CBRS and part of that will be Wi-Fi, you know? And there's just so many different sectors in the wireless space. And like I said, there's room for everybody. And we know folks that focus on specific verticals and we have a few ourselves. And we're all kind of running our own little businesses and trying to get to scale in those markets. You're just, I love speaking with you, Justin. It's just, I feel like there's so many little morsels you drop and I just like want to dive in. So yes, we definitely have to do a part two of this. I think that's a fabulous idea. But I do want to get to the fun, fast, rapid fire question section of our podcast. So think of the first thing that pops into your mind when we ask you some funny little questions. Here we go. So what's the most interesting thing that not many people know about you? Wow, I'm pretty open book. You know, I have a big mouth and I talk a lot. So people certainly know everything about me. I think those circling back to your first question, what gets me up and going every day? They're really two things. Naturally, my kids, right? And trying to build something that they're proud of and that one day maybe they'll do something with. I think the second part of that is, we've been talking about, I guess, and I keep using the stupid analogy, but I love trying to create businesses that are off the main path to start and kind of see where these needs are, fill those needs, build those businesses up, and grow them from there. I think that gets me going. Like, how can we disrupt things? How can we do something different? Because if you're in line to do it, everybody else is doing, that's fine. But I don't think it's not as exciting. It's not fun, right? And if it's not fun and there's no risk, then you're not gonna get the reward out of it, typically. So the old counterbounces, the more risk you take, the greater the reward. And hopefully, you win more than you lose, right? And everybody in the world's got losses. But sometimes getting those wins makes up for those losses, and losses along the way are the best way to learn. But the Ws are just as much fun. I don't know how much truth it is, but I certainly heard that Elon Musk was like nearly bankrupt before he started Tesla. Right, the guys are insane, you know? We got a billion dollars an hour, whatever the hell it is. I know the markets have been tanking recently, but, you know, it's, I think it's just fine. But again, another guy that said, hey, like these solutions need to be met, right? And someone's gotta do it, so I'll do it. And it's pretty awesome. Great story. So we're in the holiday period. What's a movie you could watch over and over again on replay? God, my kids, like even though they're older, I mean, certainly the Home Alone series they love, right? They love Kevin and they love that aspect. And I mean, you just can't go wrong. There's Christmas especially, right? Is that time where you have like Elf in the Grinch and like Home Alone and National Lampoon's Christmas? I mean, there's so many that I've seen 10,000 times that I know over the next coming weeks are just gonna be on repeat in our house. Literally on a Christmas story, I think they play it on a channel that's just back to back. So I think I know every line by now, but yes, Jamie? Yes, it makes the holidays feel like the holidays. Like there's something nice about welcoming them back into your home again. Like, you know, same thing with Christmas carols. Like I, did I mention I was Christmas crazy earlier? Sing your favorite carol for us, Jamie, right now, just for the... That's another episode. Yeah, but that's on to kick-off time. We'll hit that on the next deep dive, I wanna hear I wanna hear more songs. More songs by Jamie. All right, so what is the best new app on your phone that you've come across recently? Oh, wow. I'll tell you a good one for those people that have children out there. It's called Bark app. And so just a tip for all the parents. I have two teenage kids and a middle school kid and they're addicted to these things, you know, these and whatever the heck else they have that's connected. And best thing I ever did was get this app on my phone and limit their time, right? On these devices. And it was met with the utmost fiercest resistance. But it's kind of like you click the button, turn off their phones and you can set these times. And it's like, oh, they come running down. My phone doesn't work. I said, okay, good. Go outside and go dig a hole, you know what I'm saying? I love it. Go play some basketball, go do something that's not attracted to your phones, right? And so just a tip, that is worth its weight in gold. I'm gonna actually download that and set it for myself. I said, that'll be smart. Because I'm a complete junkie when it comes to my phone. But yeah, thanks so much for joining us, Justin. Really informative and insightful. And it's great to see the next wave of innovation and wireless happening with companies like SVP, Dimple Small, newer entrance. And I think that's where all the exciting stuff is gonna come from over the next year, so. Thank you, honor and pleasure was mine. I really appreciate the invite to do this with you guys today. We love chatting with you, Justin. You always blow my mind and love everything you do in there on SVP, definitely a company to watch. So thank you so much for your time. And listeners, if you enjoyed our data movers podcast as much as we've done, please go ahead and check out jsa.net slash podcast for other upcoming episodes. We release every other week on Wednesday morning. So please join us. Yeah, and follow us and engage us on Twitter. We need more tweets mentioning the podcast. Anyone who tweets, listen to this and tweets that. He gets a $30 voucher for the holidays. So I wanna, let's let's gamify this and let's get some, some, some reactions to the show. Thanks so much. Ooh, you heard it first, guys. All right, everybody, stay safe, enjoy the holidays. And have a good day.