 Hello everyone, welcome to this special Cube conversation and kickoff preview of the Mobile World Congress, Barcelona event. It's a physical event that's going to be taking place in person. It will probably be the first hybrid big event, 68 days until the June 28th kickoff. You might have heard telco DR, a telco disruptor is on a mission to move the telco industry to the public cloud. And it's taken of one of the biggest spaces this year from Erickson. It's the big story everyone's talking about. And of course, the Cube is excited to be there and broadcast and be a partner with telco DR. So I'm excited to bring on the founder and CEO of telco DR, Danielle Royston. Danielle, great to see you. Thanks for coming on for this Mobile World Congress preview. Thank you so much for having me. I'm psyched to talk to you about this. It's going to be great. So Erickson always has the biggest booth, 14 years. You're disrupting Barcelona. I'm not people sure it's going to be on or off. It's officially on. It's happening. And it's going to be a physical event. We're coming out of COVID, still a risky move. It's going to be a big hybrid event. It's going to be in person. Tell us the story. How did you guys come out of nowhere, a disruptor, take the biggest real estate in the place and turn it into a community event, a news event, a media event, everything. Tell us. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I think it was March 9th, a little over a month ago, Erickson announced that they were pulling out of MWC and it's very analogous to what happened in 2020. They were one of the first vendors to bail as well. And it kind of started this like title wave of people saying, can't do it. And I think the distinction now is that, that was at the beginning of COVID. There's a lot of unknowns. You know, is it coming? Is it not? Is it safe? Is it not? We're now, you know, a year, 50, you know, three, four months into it. I think that when you look at where we are now, cases are trending down, the vaccine is up. And I think the legacy players are sort of backward looking. They're like, this is a repeat of 2020. We're going to, it's not safe to go. We're going to pull out. And I'm like, with a hundred days to go and the vaccine ramping, I think, I see it a different way. I think there's a really big opportunity. John Hoffman, CEO of the GSMA, had put out a two-page missive on LinkedIn where he was personally responding to questions about how serious they were about making sure the event was safe and could be held. And my view was, this is going to happen. And with Erickson pulling out, I mean, this is hollowed ground. I mean, this is, you know, massively successful company that has customers literally trained like Skinner's chickens to come to the same spot every year. And now I get to, you know, put out my shingle right there and say welcome and show them the future, right? And instead of the legacy past and all the normal rhetoric that you hear from those, you know, sort of dinosaurs, Erickson and Nokia, now they're going to hear about the public cloud. And I'm really excited for this opportunity. I think the ROI on this event is instant. And so it was a pretty easy decision. I think I thought about it for about 30 seconds. It's a real bold move. And it's a, again, it's a risk. It pays off if it happens, if it doesn't, you know, you didn't happen. But you're like, it's like the startups that put a Super Bowl commercial off for the first time. It's a big hit and it's a big gamble that pays off, it's huge. Take us through, I heard, how did it all happen? Did you just wake up and so it was open to the, how do you know that it was open? Was it like, does the email go on and say, hey, I got this huge space for 15 years? Well, I mean, it was big news. It was big news in the industry that they were pulling out and all the journalists were like, oh, here we go again. You know, everyone's going to bail, who's next, right? And everyone was sort of like building that sort of negative momentum energy. And I'm like, we got to squash this. So I put out a tweet on Twitter. I mean, I'm not the most followed person, but I'm kind of known in telco. And I was like, hey, GSMA, I'll take over the booth. And I don't think people even liked my tweet, right? Like no likes, no retweets. I reached out to a couple of journalists. I'm like, let's do an interview, let's do a story. Everyone's like, well, have you on the podcast in a month? And I'm like, what? So when John Hoffman had put out that letter, I had connected to him. And so I was like, oh, I'm connected to the CEO of the GSMA. So I went out on LinkedIn and I referenced the story. And I said, John Hoffman, I'll take over the booth. And I think about 30 minutes later, he responded and said, let's do it. And I said, great, who do I talk to? And I was in touch with someone within a couple of hours. And I think we put the whole deal together in 48 and I think wrote the press release and announced it on Friday. So happened on Tuesday the ninth announced by that Friday. And I was like, GSMA, we've got to get this out and we've got to stop the negative momentum of the show and get people to realize it's going to be different in June. This is going to happen. Let's go do it. And so I think they are, they're psyched that I stepped into the booth, it's a big booth. It's 65,000 square feet, 6,000 square meters for the rest of the world that uses the metric system. And I mean, that's huge. I mean, that's the size of a professional pitch in a football field, a soccer field that's one and a half football fields. It's a ton of space, it's a ton of space to fill up. That's huge. And I think what's interesting is it points out that this new business model of being connected, you were unlinked in, you connect to them, you get a deal done so fast. This is the direct to consumer and as a startup you're literally took over the primo space, the best space in the area. So congratulations. And the other thing that's notable and why I'm excited to talk to you is that this kind of sets the table for the first global, what I call hybrid event. This will probably be a cornerstone case study in and of itself because we're still kind of coming out of the pandemic, people are getting vaccinated, people want to fly, they want to get out of the house. We're partnering with theCUBE and theCUBE 365 platform and we love hybrid, we love doing events, theCUBE, that's what we do with video. Now we're going to do a partnership with you to create this hybrid experience. What can people and guests who come to Barcelona or watch remotely expect? Yeah, so I think there's a couple of experiences that we're trying to drive in the booth. I think obviously demonstrations. I can't fill 65,000 square feet on my own. I'm a startup small company. And so I am inviting like-minded forward-thinking companies to join me in the booth. I'm paying for it, providing a turnkey experience for those vendors. And so I think what we have in common is we're thinking about future technologies like OpenRAN on the network side and obviously public cloud, which is a big part of my message. And so first and foremost, there's come and see the companies that are driving the change, the new technologies that are out there and what's available for carriers to start to adopt and think about. MWC is a meeting intensive event. Deals are done at this show. In 2019, I think the stat is $65 billion of deals were put together at the show. And so a big component of the booth will be a place for executives to come together and have private conversations. And so we're gonna have that. So that's gonna be a big piece of it. And I think the third part is driving education and thought leadership. And so there's gonna be a whole talk track, right? Tech topics, business topics, customer case studies, involve the hyperscalers and really start to educate the telco community around these new technologies. But there'll be shorter talks. They won't be like hour long keynotes. We're talking 15, 20 minutes. And I think one thing that we're gonna do with you as you were just talking about with theCUBE is, MWC was the first big show to have to cancel with COVID. I think in 2019, sorry, 2020, the dates, it's always the last Monday and February and the rest of that week. And so that's like right at the beginning of the COVID stuff, Italy was just starting to take off. And so it was one of the first shows that had to make a big call and decided cancel, which they did. This is gonna be one of the first shows that comes back online post COVID, right? And so I don't think things just snap back to the way that they used to be. I don't think we as consumers are gonna snap back to the way that we were operating. We're now used to being able to get curbside delivery from any restaurant in the city, right? I mean, it's just a sort of a different expectation. And so partnering with theCUBE, we really want to provide an experience that brings the virtual people into the booth. Typically in events like this, you really have to be there to see it. Booths are kind of like unveil the day of the show, what's going on. One thing I'm trying to do is really educate people about what you can expect. What can you see? This is what it's gonna look like. And so we're gonna start to share some pictures of the booth, of what it looks like. Number one, to drive excitement with the partners that are coming, right? Like you're gonna be part of something really, really fabulous. I think number two, attendees can wait, I don't know, week of to make the decision to go. And so maybe if COVID continues to trend down and vaccines are picking up steam, maybe they're like, it's safe for me to go and I wanna go be a part of that. But I think from here on out, we're gonna have sort of that virtual experience that's always gonna be part of shows. And so we're gonna experiment with you guys. We're gonna have a live streaming event over the course of the all MWC. It's gonna be a way for people who are unable to travel or can't afford it, right? COVID or whatever, see what's going on in the booth. And it's gonna be everything from listen to a talk, to watch what you guys are typically famous for, your awesome interviews. We're gonna have Man on the Street. Like, we're here at a demo station. Take us through your little demo. We're gonna have telepresence robots that people can reserve and crews to the booth. The robot can go to a talk. The robot can watch on the streaming thing. The robot can go to a demo. The robot can go to a meeting and it's controlled by the virtual attendee. And so experimenting, right? Like, how do we make this great for virtual people? How do we make the virtual people feel part of the physical? How do the physical people feel the virtual people that are attending and really just make it feel like a community of both? So we're excited. That's super awesome. And I think first of all, thank you for having paying for everyone and including theCUBE in that. But I think this speaks to the ecosystem of open. You're bringing, you're creating an open ecosystem. And I think that is a huge thing. So for people who are at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, this is going to be a nice, safe place to hang space as well as get deals done. It's going to be comfortable. It's going to be a media center. We'll get you on the digital TV. But also, you're also designing what I call the first hybrid experience. Not just having people having on-demand videos on their website, connecting Barcelona with other parts of the world, with media and stories and content. I think that to me is going to be a great experiment slash upgrade. We'll see, we're going to see how it goes. Well, it was really, I mean, we all lived through 2020. I mean, some of the shows went on, AWS's re-invent happened. Google did like a crazy nine-week program. It's very lonely to participate in those virtual events, right? You kind of log on by yourself. No one's really tweeting about it. You're watching an event. The event is great, but it was really lonely. And so, I think what people love about the physical events is we're together and we're not working and we're meeting people. And so, I think continue to evolve that experience so that virtual is not as lonely. So we'll see, we'll see how it goes. I gotta say, your vision is really aligned with us and others that are in this open innovation world because if you look at like the cube, physical went away, we had no events. We did cube virtual, a new brand. It wasn't a pivot. It was an extension, a line extension of the cube. Now the cube's coming back to the physical. We're going to bring that cube virtual to connect everybody. So this is it. And it just amplifies the value of the physical event. So if done right, it's so much cooler. So that's cool. And what I want to ask you on the physical side to kind of bring it back to physical is, there's still going to be keynotes, there's still going to be talks at Mobile World Congress. And so I saw that scheduled and I just saw last week, GSMA announced, you're going to be doing a keynote speech. What's amazing. So how did that happen? So give us the lowdown on the keynote that you're doing. I'm sure the entire industry is like, how did that happen? And it probably has something to do with the fact that I have one of the biggest booths at the space. I always put in a request to speak. I feel that I have a really exciting message to share with the industry over the last, I guess it's been nine or 10 months. I've really been trying to amplify my voice. I have a podcast, I have a newsletter, I'm talking to execs. I have a list that I literally go down one by one stalking each executive of like, have I talked to them? Like how I told them about like the power of the public cloud. And so I am super thankful that I have this opportunity to spread this message. And I'm planning a really epic talk. We're just, I really want to shake the industry and this is my opportunity, right? This is my opportunity to stand on the biggest stage in our industry and command a presence and send out my message. And I'm absolutely thrilled to go do it. And I hope I crush it. I hope it's like a mic drop experience and can't wait to do it. Well, we're looking forward to covering it. And we love the open vision. We love the idea of public cloud and the enablement and the disruption because just like you got the deal so fast, you can move fast with modern applications with the cloud, moving at cloud scale, complete content game changer. So great stuff. So totally applaud that. Looking forward to, and we're here to cheer you on and ask the tough questions. I do want to get to on Twitter yesterday though, you put out on TweetStorm on Twitter about the plans, kind of teasing out the booth, how you're going to plan to build the booth. Are you worried that you're opening up too much of the kimono here and opening up, putting too much on the table? Cause it's usually a secret. Mobile world Congress is supposed to be secret, not publicly out there. What's the, you know. Well, I mean, I think this is just a little bit of the change that's happened post COVID, right? You know, people usually build their booth in and don't reveal it until the first day of the show. And it's kind of like this excitement to go see what is their, what's their big message and what's their big reveal. And there's always fun stuff. I think this here's a little bit different. So first, like I said, a first big event back. I think I need to create a little bit of excitement for people who are going and maybe entice people that maybe you should think about coming. I realized this is a super personal decision, right? It depends on where you are and the country and your health and your status. But if you can do it, I want people to know that you're going to miss out. It's going to be super fun. So, so yeah. Let's take a look at the booth though. That's what my next question wants to see. I know we have, guys, do we have that rendering? Let's pull that up and let's talk this through. Let's go look at the rendering. So you can see here on the screen, take us through this. Yeah, so what we want to do is give the sense of it, of Cloud City, right? And that's what we're calling the space. In Cloud City, there's, in a city, there's outdoor space like you see here. And then there's indoor space. And indoors is where you work, where you buy, where you meet. And so you can see here on the left, the demo stations that would have different vendors displaying, you know, and it kind of, it goes way back. I mean, what we're feeling, like I said, is like a football field, an American football field and a half or a European football field, a pitch. It's pretty extensive. And so we think we're going to have, I don't know, 20, 30 vendors showing their different software. I think we're scheduling or planning for about 24 different meeting rooms that we can schedule. All COVID safe with the space requirements in there. But in that outdoor space, it would be where you learn, right, the education. And then I think we're going to have this fabulous booth for theCUBE. It's going to look just so amazing with the backdrop of this amazing building. And I think I underappreciated or didn't really realize how devastated both the event planning industry has been from COVID as well as construction. Obviously, when events were shut down, these companies had to lay off thousands of workers. Some of the big firms have laid off 50% of their workforce. And these people, you know, they didn't just go home and sit around. They had to come up with a livelihood. These people have pivoted into another job. And they're not really, I mean, events aren't really back yet. So some of these firms are shrunk. You know, the manpower is severely reduced. But then I think on the other side is, and you can see this in just housing construction. There's a lumber shortage. There's just shortage of materials. And so everything that we source for the booth pretty much has to come from Spain. And so when we look at the booth, you know, we have a pretty significant ceiling. It looks like the roof of the building. It's an engineering feat to do that we're still, you know, working through the, I'm sure someone with a protractor is doing lots of math. You know, the glass, we have those huge, beautiful glass spans in the front, getting a glass that spans that height. I think it's, I think it's 18 feet. It's six meters tall. And that's going to be hard. Things like the flooring, I want to have like hardwood laminate flooring. So it looks like hardwood floors. Don't know if we can find them, right? They're like, why don't you do carpet? I'm like, can you just check one more vendor? I really want my floor. So we'll see how it goes. And yeah, I think that sharing this plan, the trials and tribulations, like how can this small startup, right? That usually, you know, takeover space that usually takes nine months to plant, right? Who is this girl? What is she doing? How are they going to pull this off? You know, I think it's like grab your popcorn and watch the train wreck or, you know, hero's journey, we get it done. Well, people are on clubhouse. They're bored. They want to get out. I think this is a case that Mobile World Congress has a huge economic impact as a show. It's got its own little economy built around it. It impacts the country of Spain and Barcelona, the city, great city, people love it. And so it certainly is notable and newsworthy. We will be following that story. I have to ask you more of a kind of a tactical question. If you don't mind, while I have you here, can you talk about some of the vendors that are coming and the kinds of talks you're going to have inside the booth and how do people get involved? You mentioned it's open to people who love open, ran and open public cloud, open technologies. I mean, that's pretty much everybody. That's cool and relevant, which is like almost the whole world now. So like, is it going to be a space? Is there a criteria? How do people get involved? What's the collaboration formula? Yeah, no, I had been working on putting together a list of potential vendors. You'd be surprised. Not everyone is as bullish as I am on the public cloud. And so there is a little bit of a filtering criteria, but otherwise anyone can come, right? Enterprise software vendors in Telco where their primary customer is a communications service provider that their software runs on the public cloud. Come on in, right? People using open, ran and it's still a little sort of small band of cohorts that are really trying to drive this new technology forward and they're going up against some of the biggest companies in Telco, right? They're going up against Huawei, they're going up against Ericsson. Both those guys are very anti and they're not really pro open ran because it's hugely disruptive to their business. And so I'm pretty sure those guys are not psyched to see open ran become a thing in Telco. And so it's really sort of about disruptive technologies that are in the booth. And so yeah, I'm paying for the space. I'm paying for the build out, bring your demos, bring your people, come up with your marketing message and let's build a community. And so we're talking to open ran vendors like Mavineer, which is a pretty big name in the open ran space. I've been talking with Parallel Wireless and Altio Star. Those are also great players. Software vendors like Tatoki, which is a talk that I did a little over a month ago about this new startup that has a web scale charger that they're trying to put out there. Aria is another company that I'm really familiar with that has some cloud forward software. And then little tiny startups like Zequence and some other up and comers that no one's heard of. So we're really excited to invite them into the booth. I've been secretly stalking Elon Musk and Starlink and SpaceX to be a part of it. And we'll see, right? I'm kind of using Twitter and whatever I can to reach out and see if they want to be a part of it. But yeah, it's kind of really open arms, not really excluding people. Well, Elon is very disruptive and he reached out on, you can reach out on him on Twitter. He's accessible. I mean, you got to break through, but he has got an antenna up for innovators, people who think differently. They love people who break down walls and markets or open wins. I mean, we know there's a history. We've been covering it. I've been involved in my career. People who bet against open always lose. It's happened in every single wave of innovation. So Elon's gettable. Let's get him. Who doesn't love Elon Musk? I mean, I think some people don't. I love him. He's my hero. I model a lot of the things that I do around his, his approach to his vision, right? 20 years ago or close to 20 years ago, 2003, he said he was going to put people on Mars. And I think people laughed at him for being like the PayPal guy and this guy's crazy. But every year he makes progress against his goals, right? We have a relandable rocket. He's doing a manned mission this week, a second manned mission or third manned mission. The guy makes progress. And I think I'm on the same mission here. My mission is to move Telco to the public cloud. I think it's a long journey, right? I think people are like, who's this girl? And she's like 12 people and what's your story? And I'm like, I don't care. I have a singular mission. It's a quest. I am not going to stop until I move the industry to the public cloud. It's my life's mission and I'm psyched to do it. Well, we love the mojo. We love your style. We love Elon Musk's mojo. And again, just to bring the dots together, you have that same mindset, which is, people love her like Elon. He's a builder, right? He builds things and he delivers. So as you said, so I really appreciate the work you're doing. I love your philosophy. We're in total agreement. Open, open, building, doing it together as a collective, being part of something. This is what the world needs. You got a lot of great ideas in the works and we can't wait to hear them and what you got coming up over the next 68 days. This is the first of many conversations together. Thank you so much. Yeah, that's going to be so awesome. Thank you so much for having me psyched to talk to you about it. Okay, Mobile World Congress is happening in Barcelona on the June 28th. It's going to be in person and it's going to be probably the biggest hybrid event to date. Be there, check out TelcoDR and theCUBE and the space that they took over 14 years at the helm there. Ericsson had it, now it's TelcoDR. Danielle Rosenthal is the founder and CEO here with me from TelcoDR. Thanks for watching.