Justin Mallen | Handling Data Servers for the Largest Shopping Day in the World, How 5G Will Change the Internet, and Huawei's Future

Today on The Negotiation, Todd speaks with Justin Mallen, Founder, and CEO of Silk Road Telecommunication. He shares what it is like being one of the few successful foreign entrepreneurs in China, having entered the market during a time when it was far from the economic powerhouse that it is today.

Justin says, “China’s telecom infrastructure is owned and operated by three incredibly large, state-owned enterprises: China Telecom, China Unicom, and China Mobile. Back then, they had the one key resource which you needed: networking; and they did not want people in their space.”

Justin defines success, at least in the early days, simply as “being able to create a business that had staying power”. SRT is a capital intensive venture that was founded in 2000. It is a  thriving operation today, but the road to get to this point was fraught with scores of challenges in the beginning. Primarily, it was a matter of turning these carriers—and other gatekeepers—from competitors into partners. Justin’s prediction that the internet would take the world by storm in the near future was a driving force that paid off in spades.

As a data center business, SRT began with infrastructure as a service as its sole focus: they build, operate, maintain, and own the buildings that house all the servers for the internet. Today, these sites serve as the “heartbeat” for tech companies such as Alibaba, Tencent, and JD.com. Because of recent, rapid advancements in technology, today, SRT also offers platforms as a service (cloud, data, and big data analytics vendors) as a necessary additional layer atop infrastructure.

Information traveled incredibly slowly in the early 1990s China. Justin’s initial goal was to simply speed things up. The biggest strength he saw in the country’s carriers was that they were very eager to invest in building up the infrastructure and capabilities of the internet. The goal of SRT was to develop the infrastructure so that the cost of delivery to consumers could be minimized. Over time, this grew the number of internet users in China to over 900 million in the first quarter of 2020.

5G takes the latency—the time it takes for data to move between a device and the servers—down to zero. It makes connectivity much smoother and effectively instant. Driverless cars are incredibly prone to accidents if they use 4G, with its latency of 40 milliseconds. 5G removes this barrier, as well as those of many other industries, which allows for further innovations such as telemedicine and remote surgery.