In the military, leadership is essential and something that every soldier must learn. You have to go through leadership training so that you can apply that to your life in the military and after. This is exactly what Josh Broder did. He always knew he was a leader and after his service, he became the CEO of Tilson. He is on a mission to build America’s information infrastructure by building and designing wireless networks. As a leader, he believes that hiring the right people for the job is very important. By having the right work culture and flexibility, everyone will be able to achieve their goals in the company. Learn what it’s like to work through COVID-19. Discover why hiring veterans is a smart choice. And know what makes a good leader. Join the conversation today to find out.
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Essential Leadership in the 5G Era with Josh Broder, CEO of Tilson
I want to thank you for joining me. I have a very special guest. He is someone that I greatly respect in the industry, as well as a valued client, Josh Broder. He is the Founder and CEO of Tilson. I am so excited about this conversation. Josh, thank you for being on the show.
Thanks for having me on.
I want to talk a little bit about something that I do talk about from time to time on the show and that is leadership, looking at your journey, how you got to where you are, how did Tilson come to be. Digging in a little bit in that area because it’s important as we move toward 5G to look at the leaders behind 5G. Tell me about your journey and how did you get to where you are, everything. I want to know what your first job was in your whole life.
My first job was being a sea kayak guide in the summers. If you think about what being a guide is, it’s being a leader, and making sure that everybody arrives where they’re supposed to go, and that nobody gets hurt along the way.
Are you still doing that now?
I feel like I’m still doing that. When I was in high school, I knew that I wanted to be a leader. I was moved to join the Army and I wound up taking a scholarship to go to college in the Army. I had a normal college education and then I owed them some time afterward. From that standpoint, I’m an intentional leader but I’m an accidental technologist. When I was in college, the deal was if your nose was on the grindstone, you made your grades and did a good job in ROTC, you’d get a lot of preference in your assignment.
I wanted to go to Japan to be a military intelligence officer, meaning I lead a group of people doing intelligence work in Asia. I didn’t wind up getting to do that. When September 11th happened, the plane that hit the Pentagon killed the group of people that we’re meeting to give us our assignments and burned our files. I wound up graduating from college and having no assignment from the Army. I got commissioned as a Second Lieutenant, which is the most junior officer leader person and they don’t know what to do with me.
Along with my whole cohorts who were administratively in limbo, teaching at the Military Studies Department, where my ROTC unit was in Vermont. I wound up being a branch in the Signal Corps, which is the part of the Army that does telecommunications. I wound up going to Germany right before the second invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan was already going on. There was a bunch of stuff happening in other places. I wound up spending four and a half years, almost five, traveling around the world.
I spent the whole time overseas in 22 countries and building a lot of networks. I’m an accidental technologist but now I’m a recovering network engineer. I got to build a bunch of networks. I wound up in leadership, which I had intended and I got a lot of great leadership experience. I also wound up learning about networks and appreciated the capability of broadband networks to connect to people over distance. It will accomplish great things together despite geographic distance.
[bctt tweet=”Tilson is on a mission to build America’s information infrastructure.” username=”rcrwirelessnews”]
When I came back to the US, I was looking for a job. I wound up going to work for a company called Tilson. I was the third employee. At the time, the company was doing consulting only. It wasn’t building anything. Quickly, we got into building some networks because that was the thing that interested me. My then business partner had an opportunity to work for some of my Army buddies who were back in Europe, running a defense contractor, and that precipitated me buying the company when it was still small with 10 or 15 employees. Fast forward to now, a bunch of serendipity has led to a different business but all of that meant I was an intentional leader and an accidental technologist.
How many employees do you have now?
We have about 600.
How many years was that from 10 to 600 employees?
In 2011, we were probably 10 or 15 employees. It’s been about ten years.
Let’s talk a little bit more about Tilson. Tilson is on a mission. I see it right there and I see it all day long on LinkedIn. I absolutely love that being a veteran myself. I can relate to that. Who is Tilson? Talk about your services and where have you come to? You are a different company now than you were then.
Now, Tilson is on a mission to build America’s information infrastructure. We’re passionate about designing and building networks. We design wireless and fiber networks about 50/50. We work for the cellular industry wireline ISPs providing broadband, both large and small, and also other non-carrier customers. We do quite a lot of work for public utilities, in particular, power distribution and transmission.
We also work for some government agencies that use networks. We view anybody who’s a large-scale network owner as a potential customer. In the last few years, we’ve also developed an infrastructure company that develops and markets smart city poles, towers, and does fiber commercialization for large fiber network owners like state DOPs who have intelligent transportation systems that want to get carrier customers. We help them with those big projects.
The business is a lot more diverse than it used to be. One of my pet projects now is scaling our smart infrastructure knock as a service business. We design and build those networks. We maintain those networks. Increasingly, our network-owning customers have asked us to do active monitoring of those networks and self-dispatch. We have that active monitoring capability.
Let’s look back at the military because I’m sure that there are things that you learned from your service, thank you for your service, by the way. There are things that you learned that helped you in business. What are some of those values and lessons that you’ve learned in the military?
One of the things that is meaningful about military service is that it comes with structured and institutional leadership training and a lot of real-world opportunities to put that to work in practice. As I’m sure you saw in your service at all ranks that leadership training comes into play. In the military, if you have a group of three people, there’s an expectation that the senior-most person is going to take charge and be a leader of those other two people.
There are very few people who are individual contributors. No matter what your journey in the military is, if you’re in it for more than a year, you wind up having some responsibility for other people. Part of that experience taught me that leadership is a sacred trust. The idea is that you’re responsible for somebody else’s physical and life safety, emotional health, in the business context, in the military context too, their career progression and development. All of those things are things that I’ve tried to infuse into Tilson.
Describe your leadership style. How was it created? Did you have mentors, people that influenced you as a leader?
I had some incredible mentors along the way and still do now. Leadership is a journey and I’m constantly learning. I look back at my old self and say, “That old self was pretty naive.” The only thing you get with age is an appreciation of how little you know. The farther I go, the more I realized what I didn’t know before. You start to appreciate that there are some known unknowns. I’ve had mentors all along the way. I think one guy, in particular, Pat Carr. He was a guy in the military who I reported to when I was in Afghanistan.
He was focused on developing his teams, and building capable leadership and management teams. As I think about now at Tilson, I’m at a place now with 600 employees where it doesn’t matter what I do throughout the day. I could sell 100 deals or operationally supervise 100 projects, it wouldn’t move the needle. It doesn’t matter. All of the good things that happen in Tilson happened because of a capable and autonomous team.
My main purpose now as a leader has been building and developing that senior management team, who’s good at what they do, who are culturally aligned and providing broad cultural leadership in the company. It’s hard because as a recovering network engineer, I’m getting into the work. I like what we do. I’ve never been happier about the quality of the senior team that we have now. A big part of my job is making sure the conditions are right for their success and staying out of their way.
Let’s talk about the Tilson culture. This is something to be admired. I’ve known you for a long time in the industry. I’ve been in the industry for a few years and that’s nothing compared to most people. I’ve watched Tilson grow. I’ve also heard being in staffing from a candidate after candidate saying, “I want to work for Tilson. Do you know anybody at Tilson?” They are calling us and talking about Tilson. You and your team have created an amazing culture. Talk about the benefits and the values of that culture.
[bctt tweet=”Leadership is a sacred trust. It’s the idea that you’re responsible for somebody else’s life.” username=”rcrwirelessnews”]
When we think about the culture at Tilson, it’s less about what we say and more about what we do. We hire and retain based on our core values. Like many organizations that have a codified set of values that they can articulate and pass along, we have some things that are familiar in a bunch of companies, things like integrity and respect. We have a couple that are different that we don’t often see in other people’s corporate value stacks. That’s how we think about differentiating ourselves. Those are safety and composure.
On the safety side, it wouldn’t be unusual for a company that has guys climbing towers and digging around gas lines to view why safety is a core value to operate. We take that to another step and say like, “We’re willing to be at a financial disadvantage if it means that we’re doing the right thing from a safety perspective.” We don’t view safety as purely physical. We also think about emotional safety and the idea that people can be their full selves at Tilson. Tilson has a super diverse group of people who come from all backgrounds and categories.
They’re bound together by a common mission to not just build America’s information infrastructure but to take care of each other. We’d like to think that it’s a place where people can be their best selves at work and where they’re accepted. We take it a click further and say that there’s also a psychological safety that happens. That’s the safety to screw up, make a mistake or express an opinion. The idea is that we’re a stronger team if people feel empowered to act and take some risks. That’s a core value that we do not just talk about but we hire and fire around.
The other is composure. Our customers often engage us to do the hardest, scariest, most difficult thing they’ve ever done before because we’re a growth company. Sometimes that’s true for us too. One of the things they’re buying from us is not just getting the work done competently but maintaining our composure and working through the inevitable problems, stumbling blocks, relational difficulties, the ups and downs, trials and tribulations of $100 million projects over three years out on the streetscape.
One of the things we bring to those projects is our composure. Keeping our composure and our client work makes it a nice place to work because we’re not yelling and screaming at each other. We’re focused on finding solutions and you recognize the inevitability. That’s going to be hard and messy. Having the confidence that we’ll find our way through any challenge makes it a little bit of a different place to work. We’d sometimes say, “The work is hard but it doesn’t have to be a hard place to work,” for that reason.
You have a strong sense of corporate purpose. We’ve talked about this before. How is Tilson’s why different?
We look at our why both internally and externally. This mission of building America’s information infrastructure has come into sharp relief during the pandemic period. Everybody not just intuitively understands but literally understands what it means to have your whole life be online. We recognize the power of connecting people and how important that is for access to education, health care and work opportunities.
Our other why is that we’re on a mission to arrive there together and make sure that our team members can be their best selves. That’s led to a different kind of peer group and support. It’s not competitive. It’s collaborative. That’s the effect of attracting a lot of military veterans. We have a lot of military veterans in the company, not because they’ve defined the culture but they’re magnetically attracted to a place where the sense of arriving together and taking care of each other is part and parcel of the work.
A common archetype of someone that we hire is someone that maybe is disillusioned. Maybe they’ve come out of the military and spent a couple of years. Everything is about my individual achievement and not about team success, and that leads to some crazy behaviors. I’m looking to get back to a more team mission-focused environment. We’ve gotten that feedback from our returning veterans and we think that’s why it’s compelling for them.
Let’s talk about COVID-19. How has COVID impacted your culture? How are you handling the workforce challenges now such as remote work? How are you dealing with all of this?
The first thing is that COVID has been hard for us like it has been for a lot of people. There have been a lot of personal tragedies on our team. Employees have lost spouses, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and cousins. Our bereavement leave is 4 or 5 times its normal annual average. Keep in mind, that’s at a time when nobody could go to funerals for most of that time. People are having it more in private. It was a very hard year for those reasons. Getting beyond the existential, it was hard to operate. People had their kids at home. I had my kids at home. It was a mess.
It was hard to operate and the work we were doing was more important than ever. We had to deploy this infrastructure as quickly as we could because connecting to just one person made a huge difference in a lot of lives. We’ve made it through the other side, the pandemic is still going on, we’re still facing business impacts there. I feel like we’ve normalized what it means to operate in this world. For us, that means living those two values that I mentioned, safety and composure.
It wasn’t flexible. We weren’t going to let people get sick. We were going to keep our head-on in a difficult time. As we look forward, some of the things we learned about how to operate during the pandemic period will be permanent. We’ve already announced that for all of our white-collar jobs, people can work remotely as a matter of course. The managers have some discretion to pull teams together when they need to or when close collaboration is key.
We’re going to spend the next couple of years figuring out how best to have teams be connected to each other when they may be potentially remote for a long time. We have twenty offices around the country. We already had cross-functional teams that were not physically located together, but we’ve had that permanent flexibility now in remoteness. We’ve also gone through a lot of life situations for people. We’ve continued to tune our leave and absence policies to give people the flexibility they need to live the lives that they either want to live or have to live because of circumstances.
We think that benefits may be industry-leading. There’s a paid time off benefit for military members that are in the Guard and Reserve so that they can get their full salary when they’re not at work and they’re doing their Guard and Reserve work. There are caregiver leaves for people who have to take care of somebody. Who is that somebody? I don’t know. That’s up to the employee. Is it a parent or a sister or a best friend? I don’t know but life happens.
We have a whole stack of different kinds of leaves that are very flexible and basically acknowledge that life is complicated and messy. The COVID period, while we learned a lot, was an affirmation of our core values rather than changing our core values. It helped us get to the other side. We’re not immune to the trend that everybody is seeing in the industry right now. Lots of people are changing jobs. Turnovers are happening in a quarter, but we’re doing better than average.
From a talent recruitment standpoint, we get a lot of applications. In 2020, we only hired about 1% of the applications we got and we hired a few hundred people. That means lots and lots of candidates are coming in the door and the flip side to what economists are calling the great resignation is while everybody is facing churn, everybody is getting a lot of applicants. Those numbers are way up. We’ve taken this as a moment to say, “What advantage can we find in this big churn moment?”
[bctt tweet=”The only thing you get with age is an appreciation of how little you know.” username=”rcrwirelessnews”]
One thing we’ve done is we’ve said, “If there’s something you want to do at Tilson that’s different than what you’re doing or if it’s something you want to do that’s different, you can do it here.” We’ve got 150 open positions and we’re happy to provide some flexibility. We’ve done over that COVID period close to 100 reassignments, from one position to another so people could try something out in their career as opposed to doing it somewhere else. As we move forward, we recognize that job flexibility is a permanent part of the economy. We’re trying to offer that flexibility internally.
Let’s go back to diversity a bit because it’s so impressive how Tilson has maintained diversity company-wide. It’s a tough market out there. It’s still difficult to find candidates. Even though there are so many people leaving their jobs and applications, it’s still very difficult in telecom. How do you maintain diversity when it’s tough to find candidates and you need those spots filled?
Diversity became a hotter topic for us during the BLM awakening in 2020. We were asking ourselves as a company like, “Who are we? Are we doing a good job at this? Are there things that we could be doing that are different?” What we eventually honed in on were two things. One is let’s diversify the board, get that right as a first step, and then we’ll propagate that throughout the company. That’s something that we did in 2020 and early 2021. Folks who are interested in our board can come and look at our website.
The other thing that we looked at was we said, “Where are individual contributors and managers telling us that we’re succeeding and failing in this area?” By and large, the feedback we got was in a crummy job, having a diverse candidate base as we could during the hiring process. Ultimately, managers who are busy and trying to run and down and get a project done we’re being presented with finalists who are from a relatively limited labor pool. We did a lot of work structurally to make sure we are casting a wider net for candidates and inviting candidates to join our search, from all backgrounds, geographies, walks of life, ethnicity and gender.
For a category, we said, “We want to make sure that we have the widest possible net for the best possible candidates.” It shouldn’t come as a huge surprise to you that we started having much better searches and candidates because we were exposed to a much broader group of people, talent and folks that got beyond who our manager knew. We’ll never go back. We love that broader candidate base that we’ve discovered. We think we have some work to do there still to uncover pockets of talent and capability that we may not have thought to invite or didn’t have access to before. That yielded much better hires for us.
Josh, I know you have such a strong commitment at Tilson to hiring veterans. I have a question about where to find them. Veterans have so many transferable skills for 5G and telecom but where do you go to find veterans to hire?
When we started, we hired everybody we knew. There were a lot of people from units that we had all served in and they were in the company too. We’ve grown beyond that model being scalable. We look at it in a couple of ways. The first is we make it easier for veterans to find us. We do a lot of outreach through veterans’ groups and other workforce transition assistance programs. We’ve done some structural partnerships with workforce development organizations that do some reskilling and then we hire out of those programs.
We essentially provide, in some cases, financial support to the programs, hire those groups, make long-term investments and reskill veterans. We’ve also had great success with an internship program called the Department of Defense SkillBridge Program. We think we’re the leader in utilizing this program nationally for companies our size. This essentially allows transitioning veterans to come work for us during their terminal leave period for up to six months. The DOD pays their salary and we place them in an internship.
It requires a lot of sophistication to do this well. When you think about an intern versus someone who’s at the entry-level, they’re getting their start. By definition, folks who are making a transition out of the military are not at the entry level. They have a lot of work experience on cases. We’re taking them on as interns and they are twenty-year veterans. They’re at a senior level of leadership or expertise in the thing that they do.
Our key to success on that has been to assign a one-on-one mentor and help them bridge the gap between the skillset that they have and the skillset that they need to be successful on the civil side. We have about a 50% placement rate in that program. Meaning 50% of those interns who come and spend 4, 5 or 6 months with us wind up staying at the company in a full-time position, and 50% help outplace some other position. Generally, they have plenty of great offers. We’re happy about not only the social good that program is doing but it’s been great for our business. Some of our real star performers have come through that program.
You really walk your talk. What you’re committed to, you put action to. How do you identify and develop leaders? You have some of the strongest leaders, not just in the industry but on the planet. How do you do it?
It’s hard. We’re still learning and trying to figure this out, and are not successful in every instance. It’s something we care a lot about and we work hard at. Unfortunately, there are no magic bullets there. A lot of noses on the grindstone. I had talked before about this sacred trust in leadership. When you’re responsible for people, you’re not just responsible for their safety but you’re also responsible for their career success. We make sure that our new employees have one-on-one mentorship opportunities, and particularly with our individual contributors, we formalize that into an apprenticeship program.
We’re pretty advanced users of the Wireless High TIRAP Program, the Telecommunications Industry Registered Apprenticeship Program, which allows us to have one-to-one mentors with people going through a program, on the job education and advancement. It gets them from either low-skilled to skilled or skilled to highly skilled. We had several iterations of this. We’ve got about 85 employees participating on the wireless side of our business. We’re in the process of launching registered apprenticeships on the fiber construction side of our business and expect similar participation in 2022.
We’ve done it both informally and the cultural attributes of how we develop our junior and senior leaders. We’ve done it formally through some structural programs where we have that one-to-one mentorship. I say it’s hard work and there are no magic bullets. If I’ve got a problem now or I don’t have enough talent for a thing, there’s literally nothing I can do about it. We’ve either got to pass on that opportunity or bring in a partner.
We’ve said, “Talent development is a long game.” It might take 1, 2 or 3 years to build and grow the person you’re interested in. Every day that you don’t start doing that, you’re a day farther away from it. When we started doing that a few years ago, it felt like this will be a long-term investment. We’re a little company. It’s going to take a long time to have those leaders. Now, those folks are foremen on teams. We now see the fruits of our labors.
As we think about our white-collar workforce, we’ve identified two important skill development areas in terms of how do we think about the skillset that our leaders bring to the table, how to manage work and how to take care of people. That’s in analytics and AI. We’ve partnered with the Roux Institute at Northeastern University to have a cohort of student managerial employees who will be getting a full-time grad degree in either AI or business analytics on a full scholarship, and also be employed part-time at Tilson with full benefits.
The idea is that for someone who’s a family person, it could be sustainable. Maybe they wouldn’t have replacement income but they’d have income and full benefits for their family. They’d have no debt coming out of it because they have the scholarship on the graduate school side. While they’re doing that, those individuals will be brought through a rotational leadership program within the company. They’ll spend time in several divisions and have an opportunity to get to understand the industry and business from a bunch of different directions while they’re getting that other skillset. I’m excited about this program. We want to build the bridges with the external partners that would be necessary to make that happen.
[bctt tweet=”The work is really hard, but it doesn’t have to be a hard place to work in.” username=”rcrwirelessnews”]
My kids play baseball. It reminds me of a baseball team, that long view that you said and the farming of talent. Are you a baseball fan? Are you a sports fan?
It’s exactly like that. I wish I had a farm league. We do view it from that long-term development point. All the competitors hire from each other, but there are not enough people in the workforce. We’re here to solve that problem. We’re not only going to win more than our fair share, hiring the best people in the industry. We’re going to add people to the industry and focus on building a workforce we need to do the projects we think we need to do. I do hear a lot of complaining in the industry about like, “I can’t find the people I need” or whatever. It’s like, “We don’t have time for any of that.” We just focus on solving a problem, which is growing the labor that isn’t available.
What are the top three things that you look for when hiring?
The first one is critical thinking skills. We want people to question what’s put in front of them and who are not drones. That’s hard. We all work in hierarchical organizations. We all have strong clients. They’re big in structure and know what they’re doing. It’s critical from our perspective for our team members to ask that next level question, to pull the thread, and to understand when the answer isn’t the answer. The second thing is work ethic. We expect our teams to come in and do what’s necessary to get the job done. Work ethic comes in many forms. It’s not all about the gross number of hours but it’s about a shared sense of accountability for the work and doing what’s necessary.
Back to our safety value, we want to make sure that our team members are team players. It is very common. Pick an industry, there are star players who are jerks and who don’t elevate their teams, and that person has no place in our team. We’re looking for not just people who are capable but people who elevate those around them. Those are the three things, critical thinking skills, work ethic and that sense of team commitment and elevating their peers.
Josh, what’s the best piece of business advice that you’ve ever received?
Probably to always have more cash than you need because you can’t get it when you need it. I’ve gotten a lot of business advice over the years. What I would say is I’d answered the question with a slightly different answer than you asked. The best piece of career advice I’ve ever gotten and it served me well as an entrepreneur and growth mode is to say yes a lot. Start with the yes and work your way to no if you have to. Be open to the serendipity of if somebody’s having a hard need and saying yes to it.
For my most successful team members, several members of my senior management team have been up to through the ranks and they’ve consistently said, “I’m willing to take on something harder. I’ve never done that before but I’m willing to figure it out.” Saying yes in a career and as a business when clients come to us and say, “I got this crazy thing and I’ve got to get it done at this cost.” We know it’s impossible. Saying yes to some of those challenges and then being committed and taking risks to figure those things out is a similar parallel to that career to say yes.
One of my mottos is to say yes, figure it out and then be successful at it. Let’s fast forward here ten years from now. What would you tell your younger self now that you know what you know about business leadership, career and everything? What advice would you give him?
[bctt tweet=”Job flexibility is a permanent part of the economy.” username=”rcrwirelessnews”]
One of the things that I’ve learned as time has gone has been that life is complicated, and people’s circumstances are different and varied. It’s hard to have empathy for someone’s situation if you haven’t been in it. Empathy almost by definition comes from having a taste of it and understanding it. I would go back to my unmarried childless self of my twenties and say, “People who are married and have kids have a different life than you have, and have different needs and demands.” Similarly, I go back to younger versions of myself and try and help him understand the complexity and difficulty of the human condition. It puts a lot in context. It helps you calibrate expectations appropriately and have empathy in those key moments.
I keep hearing you’re all about people. Tilson is all about people. The work that you do, the mission that you’re on, and the greater purpose that you have, none of it can be done without people and taking care of people.
Ultimately, team members and employees can be mobilized and believe in a mission but they have needs too. I feel like if your business isn’t built around meeting the needs of your team, then you can’t have an expectation that your team is going to help you achieve your mission. For us, back to that safety value, “Let me take care of people and not just physically.” What drives me in business is my love for leadership. What I found is that focusing on leadership and taking seriously the sacred trust of being responsible for others has been a good business formula.
What is your ten-year vision for Tilson?
I want Tilson to be its best version of itself, which I think is a lot better and bigger than it is now. The industry has room for another very large competitor. When I think about very large competitors, we could be several orders of magnitude bigger than we are now. We’re still very small and scrappy relative to some of the big guys out there. I’d like to see Tilson be its best version of itself in that regard, which means taking on the biggest and most impactful projects. It means having a better-rounded geographic footprint. We’re opening in Puerto Rico in late 2021. We don’t have offices in Alaska or Hawaii but we want to go to the places like Alaska, Hawaii, Canada. Our customers are asking us to solve problems and be able to be that one-stop-shop for them to do it all.
Josh, this has been incredible. Thank you for your time. Thank you for sharing so openly and transparently. Where can people find out more about Tilson? I’m sure you’re hiring.
We are hiring like crazy. Our clip now is 35 people a month. They can find 150 open positions at www.TilsonTech.com. We encourage people to apply. The caveat is that we’re accepting about 1% of those applications. We would encourage you to be thoughtful about what the fit is on the team and not to be discouraged if one particular position doesn’t work out. We often have employees start with us on their 2nd or 3rd try through that process.
Josh, thank you so much for being on the show. It’s your second time. The first one was amazing. This one was amazing and I hope that we can do another show. In 2022, we’ll do one more. I truly appreciate it. This has been awesome.
Thanks for having me on, Carrie.
You take care.
Important Links:
About Josh Broder
As the CEO of Tilson, he leads an ultra-high growth team of 600 employees consulting on, developing and deploying thousands of miles of fiber, thousands of wireless sites, and hundreds of information systems in the United States every year. He is also the founder of a 5G infrastructure development company called SQF. Also a qualifying agent for general contractors licenses in every state that requires them.
As a U.S. Army Signal officer, he led a team in Afghanistan that designed and built the first modern IP network providing coverage for US and coalition forces.
