North Carolina native Dinni Jain doesn’t just run Google Fiber. In his spare time, he also helps oversee an equally complex business: a farm. Both endeavors have involved a lot of trial and error thus far. But with a winning formula for each now sorted out, the time has come for both businesses to mature from experimental adolescence to adulthood.
Situated in the rolling hills of Vermont just west of Interstate 91, Jain told Fierce he founded the farm as a retirement project in 2017 after leaving his role as COO of Time Warner Cable in May 2016. His departure coincided with Charter Communications’ acquisition of the company. Though tenuously tied to his health and interest in where food comes from, Jain admitted buying the farm was “an act of hubris,” one which set him up “for the universe to teach me a lesson in humility.”
“Farming is hard. It doesn’t matter how smart you think you are, it’s still hard,” he said. Alongside his farming partner, Heidi Thunberg, “we pretty much learned as many lessons as possible by making as many mistakes as possible.”
With a solid vegetable business now in hand, Jain said the farm is expanding into egg production and eagerly waiting for its orchards and berry bushes to mature and bear fruit.
He’s shepherding Google Fiber along a similar journey.
Though he was retired with no intention of returning to the industry when Google executives approached him about running the company, Jain said the spirit of “almost unfettered innovation” drew him in. According to Jain, Google Fiber’s willingness to experiment with new ideas – both good and bad –was almost the antithesis of the telecom model he was familiar with.
“In my first interview with the founders of Google, I learned that in a 2,000-home neighborhood, we had actually taped fiber to the sidewalk” using tape similar to the material used to stripe roadways, he said. “As an experiment, colorful, but not successful. Also, we went in some places 2 inches deep, in some places we went 4 inches deep. All of this was trying to find the perfect calculus of cost, speed but also reliability.”
The 2-inch trenching, which it used in Louisville, Kentucky, was a notorious failure which ultimately resulted in the company leaving that market in 2019.
Jain became CEO of Google Fiber in early 2018. After years of trial and error – including the very public stumble in Louisville – Google Fiber thinks it finally worked out the speed and cost equation with a business model it can replicate widely. And that, Jain said, is what was behind its decision last year to shift gears from experimentation to expansion.
Expansion ambition
Google Fiber’s decisions about where to expand are driven by a complex web of factors – or at least they have been since Jain took over. Above all else, Jain said it is looking for communities with poor broadband performance and low satisfaction with incumbent providers. With those identified, the next step is finding communities with a willingness to let it build using the micro-trenching technique it favors.
That’s how it picked the five states it is now targeting for expansions: Arizona, Colorado, Nebraska, Nevada and Idaho.
While it might start with a market or two in each, Jain said the goal over time is to edge out into surrounding communities, just as it has already done in Utah and North Carolina.
Asked whether Google Fiber is worried about competition from overbuilders, Jain said no. He explained the company is no stranger to competition. In fact, due to its slow build pace in recent years, he said it actually has not been the first fiber provider “in any of our markets except for one.” That one was Kansas City.
Thus, it’s used to going head-to-head with another fiber provider and a strong incumbent operator. “That is not daunting,” he said. In Mesa, where it could face competition from up to five new fiber providers as well as incumbents, Jain said “we’ll have to see” but added “we like our chances there.”
Jain explained the reason he is so confident Google Fiber will find success is because of the work it has poured into its customer service experience. It measures customer service health by dividing the number of calls it receives by the total number of customers in its base. When Jain started, the figure was around 30%. Now, it’s around half of that, he said. And for customers who require a technician visit, it provides a 10-minute arrival window rather than the typical four-hour timeframe. It hits its visit windows 96% of the time.
“One of the things we’ve had to learn building second fiber is building fiber isn’t enough,” he said. “Our goal in everything we do from a service standpoint is to be unrecognizable from other providers.”
He continued that there’s a misconception that “high quality service costs more.” The reality is “the best service actually saves you money.”
Google Fiber recently launched new 5-gig and 8-gig service tiers, adding to its 1-gig and 2-gig offerings. Jain noted Google Fiber is plotting to push residential speeds beyond 8-gigs. It also plans to “innovate a tiering model to make things simpler.” That’s coming later this year, he said.
Between its geographic and service expansions, Google Fiber is striving to create a sustainable and profitable business model. The ultimate goal, Jain said, is to graduate from one of parent company Alphabet’s Other Bets to a standalone entity. While he declined to provide a timeline for when that might happen, Jain said Google Fiber now has line of sight to that objective.
A history of….history
Jain’s path to CEO of Google Fiber was a meandering one. Far before his farming endeavor, and before even his tenure at Time Warner Cable, Jain studied European history at Princeton University.
Both of his parents were academics, so growing up Jain just assumed he’d follow the same path and become a professor. But while at Princeton, Jain decided that wasn’t something he actually wanted to do. So, he blindly applied for what he thought was a job at a consulting firm. During the interview, he found out it was a role at an investment banking firm and he had to explain to the interviewer why he hadn’t taken any financial classes during his college career.
He got the job though and spent “five very rough years” struggling to learn the ropes of the financial industry. While there, Jain said he followed the cable and cellular markets and decided he’d rather work in that arena. He happened to have personal connection who put him in touch with the president of a new telecom company in the U.K. called NTL. He was hired as one of the company’s first employees, assuming a position in corporate finance.
Jain spent the better part of a decade at NTL. After he left, NTL went through a bankruptcy proceeding. Jain said this was not necessarily because the company was poorly run, but because it found itself roughly 14 times levered after making 17 acquisitions in four years. Regardless, the company emerged from bankruptcy and ultimately became what is today known as Virgin Media.
After leaving NTL, Jain joined Insight Communications to move back to the U.S. He spent 10 years there as President and COO before moving to Time Warner Cable in 2014.
Five years into his tenure at Google Fiber, the CEO said he’s proud of what the company has accomplished thus far. His goal for the next five is for Google Fiber to be “in more and more places. We want to have really cemented multi-gig as the future of the ISP industry.” It will also strive to make broadband simpler.
“The real thing for us is service,” he concluded. “We’re probably only 35 or 40% through our roadmap of what we’re hoping to achieve in the space of service…So I think that to me, that is really what we want to achieve in the next five years.”
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