In case you missed IoT Stars – last Tuesday evening, the old Estrella Damn brewery, Barcelona – here is a recap of our conversation on stage with Wienke Giezeman, co-founder at Amsterdam-based LoRaWAN collective The Things Industries. And in case you don’t know IoT Stars – a kind of loose off-Broadway touring show that rocks up at major tech events to give voice to innovators in the miniaturised low-power IoT sector – the 2025 edition in Barcelona last week marked its tenth anniversary. As it goes, TTI is also celebrating a decade in IoT, and, as such, the discussion with Giezeman was a little nostalgic, riffing off nearly 10 years of conversations in these pages.
But it also attempted to reveal some home truths about IoT, this most fragmented and complicated tech sector, and about how to stay in business, and to hopefully make some money along the way. And Giezeman, like always, was candid – about the challenges the sector has faced, and how to navigate them (or how to think about them, at least). And it is worth replaying because these are the same troubles we write and read about every day in the trendy 5G and AI spaces, about how to sell to enterprises, mostly – which have been lived-hard in IoT for ages, with as many casualties as successes. And Giezeman has a good view of it.
(It will be interesting to see where his business goes next, but that is a conversation for another day.)
So, it goes something like this… from crowd-funding and basement workshops to boardrooms and balance sheets, and a bid to build an empire with a billion connected ‘things’. A decade ago, Giezeman and Johan Stokking, co-founders at The Things Industries, ran a Kickstarter campaign to raise €600,000 from fellow hobbyists to build a global open-source LoRaWAN network called The Things Network, and really to foster a developer ecosystem around it. “Because that is where adoption starts – with the developer,” says Giezeman. Fast forward 10 years, and the group claims a maker network, rather than a network-network, of 220,000 developers from across the world.
Between times, The Things Industries, offering a cloud platform for LoRaWAN device management, emerged as its central business proposition, now serving 1,000-odd customers, including large global operating companies that connect their low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) operations with non-cellular LoRaWAN. But that is a skip and a jump, over a decade; if it sounds easy, it hasn’t been, says Giezeman, in conversation with RCR Wireless in Barcelona. Reality invariably bites, he says, especially in a market that was once so hyped; and it bites hardest in IoT hardware. “You raise €600,000, ship developer devices, and quickly realise how hard hardware really is.”
He goes on: “It was an immediate lesson: if you build hardware, you have to design for failure first… If 90 percent of IoT projects fail, then you better design for failure – without going down with it.” Which is the mantra Giezeman and Stokking have repeated, along with an ecosystem directive about ‘building this thing together’; the latter, in particular, gets trotted-out every year, on signage and stage-addresses, at The Things Conference, its busy annual developer shindig in its hometown. Their history follows the industry’s narrative arc, to an extent: through hopeful entrepreneurs with soldering irons, tribal squabbles between LPWAN factions, venture funds and slide decks.
Finally, the IoT market appears to have grown up, and even settled down; IoT is a line-of-business that goes almost unquestioned by private and public sector firms – even if it remains a low-margin game for their suppliers. Giezeman says those old wild-west days, of desperate gun-slingers digging in the hills, are out of sight. He references a story in these pages, from three years ago “about how it was no longer about tech battles and hobbyist projects”. He says: “We were done with PowerPoint promises. The ecosystem woke up, all together, and realised everyone was on the same side. Because our real competition is not other IoT technologies, but inertia and missed opportunities.”
Plus the realisation the “market is smaller than it should be”, he says, and that there is collaborative work for its veterans and survivors to make it bigger, and to rope-in new believers along the way. The problem, back then, was that mad marketing hype precipitated crazy business valuations, which precipitated unbearable shareholder pressure – which unravelled, suddenly, when the hard truth of real-world IoT came out. In the end, the supplier market has been forced to be honest with itself, he says, and moved forward from there. “Companies dealing with the pressure of top-down investments got a reality check. And developers, tinkering at the ground level, also matured,” he says.
“Both sides got honest about what worked and what didn’t.” But the shift has not been painless. It is built on failure, as discussed – and lots of it. But what does not kill you… failure is a secret weapon, reckons Giezeman, and he explains this design-for-failure idea. “We made it easy for thousands of developers to try and to fail, and to unlock massive innovation in the process. Most ideas don’t work. But some do, and those successes change everything.” Just ask all the developers on The Things Network, now presented as a “community platform”, he suggests. “The ecosystem it spawned has matured into a global force,” he says.
He goes on: “Failure created trauma [in the market]. But trauma created experience. Our latest campaign urges people to ‘revisit LoRaWAN.’ We could say revisit IoT itself. Because all that past failure, all those early struggles, left a kind of institutional knowledge. We know what doesn’t work, and that is powerful.” Giezeman is blunt: forget all your dreams; success in IoT is about disciplined economics. “We talk a lot about total cost of ownership (TCO), and we really mean it. The technology needs to scale linearly with business results. IoT solutions fail because they’re still designed by romantics or optimists. But businesses don’t survive on idealism. They survive on predictable returns.”
This new pragmatism defines the market today, he reckons. The developer ecosystem is no longer galvanised by speculative gambles but by calculated gains. “If you can’t demonstrate clearly that your IoT solution saves more money than it costs, just forget about it. That’s the ‘plateau of productivity’ [in Gartner-speak]. We are here, finally.”
The Things Industries has come a long way, he reckons – from crowd-funding for hobbyist tinkering to consultative design for industrial value. The business has never taken a venture handout, he likes to make clear; and, through all the sweat and tears, it is always profitable, he says, without ever saying by how much. (Again, a separate article on its future growth strategy will be incoming, surely.) It supports more than three million connected devices globally, and operates in more than 70 countries; it has a bunch of (“tens of”) Fortune 500 companies on its books. “The transition is complete, and transformative,” he says.
Giezeman continues: “We no longer sell dreams – we sell tangible results, which are proven already, time and again. Fortune 500 firms don’t care about promises; they want certainty… We’re at the point where the promise of IoT – oversold in the past – is finally real.” Which is a kind of anachronism, maybe – that the old IoT hype is real after all, but so is the work to make it so; that the old romanticism lives on, just tinged with the pragmatism of limited margins and shared spoils. There is work to convince some, burned by old skirmishes in the sector, to give IoT another chance. The crash has been hard, he says, but the survivors are “stronger, smarter, and delivering actual results”.
He closes: “I see customers that are successful today with deployments of 10,000 devices, and I cannot honestly see a single reason why those deployments cannot scale to a million devices. It has taken 10 years, and a lot of pain and a lot of pivots. But the tinkering is finished. The IoT industry is delivering productivity now. That is the real story of IoT – hard truths, hard lessons, and real successes. The industry is getting it right, finally.”
For more from Giezeman, check out the following interviews:
2021 | ‘IoT is not about LoRa vs Sigfox anymore; it is about Design Process X vs Design Process Y’ (read more)
2021 | Once upon a time in the (New) West – how LoRa is looking to strike gold on the IoT trail (read more)
2022 | “Enough tinkering; time to deliver” – IoT gets “no-nonsense” ahead of big TTN/TTI show (read more)
2023 | The private 5G culture wars – “like listening to your parents talk about sex” (read more)
2023 | ‘This is not convergence’ – divergence, Darwinism and the death of IoT Inc (read more)
2024 | Hard truths and fairytales from the sharp-end of IoT (plus lessons for private 5G) (read more)
2024 | One liners, hard work, and a ‘loss of innocence’ – how the IoT crowd had the last laugh (read more)
