Amy Parsons: Hi, I’m Amy Parsons, president of Colorado State University and host of The Next 150 podcast. We have so many remarkable people in our community, and this is where we’re going to hear their stories. We’re going to get their perspectives on CSU’s next 150 years and gather their very best advice for today’s CSU students. Let’s get started, Rams. Hi Rams, Amy Parsons with another episode of The Next 150. Today, we are taping at the T-Mobile Headquarters in Bellevue, Washington, where we just wrapped up a couple of really great days of meetings between the CSU team and the T-Mobile team. We have such an amazing partnership. We’re going to get into that today. I’m really happy to be joined today by Mike Katz, who’s the T-Mobile President of Marketing Strategy and Products for T-Mobile. But most importantly, he is a CSU Ram. He is an alum and he’s really been spearheading this great partnership between CSU and T-Mobile, and we’re excited to talk about it today. So, thanks Mike for making the time for this and for being here today.

Mike Katz: Thanks for having me. This is a thrill for me.

Amy Parsons: Yeah, well, I got to say, thinking about our meeting yesterday, looking around the conference table yesterday, we had CSU faculty, researchers talking about water sustainability and climate resilience and soil health and we had-

Mike Katz: Lasers.

Amy Parsons: … and lasers. Yeah. We got into lasers and our fusion capabilities at CSU and our IT staff was there really looking at AI and how the network can enable next generation for student success. We had athletics at the table looking at new technologies, and you had some of your best and brightest at T-Mobile around the table, just digging in with our challenges, where we want to go, and the technology that you have to enable it. I mean, to me it was a spectacular day. I know that our team absolutely loved it and thanks to your leadership and really pulling together this partnership.

Mike Katz: Yeah, well, no, thank you to your leadership because I’ve had a goal for a long time for my alma mater to be using T-Mobile, and it’s so exciting to see that it’s actually happening. But I thought what was really cool yesterday is, it’s very clear everybody has the same orientation, which is how can we make experience better for students, for the communities in which CSU is deeply rooted in, not just Fort Collins, but all the other campuses around Colorado. And I just thought it was really cool to watch people finishing each other’s sentences about that.

Amy Parsons: A hundred percent. Yeah. And I appreciate your passion for CSU and wanting to put this together. And you and I are both alums, so we have that in common. And in the show notes for this, we’ll have your full background and your bio, but you’ve had such an impressive career at T-Mobile. Congratulations on that. And you’ve been named multiple times to the Forbes list, most influential CMOs, and you really got your start in Colorado and at Colorado State University while you were still a student. So let’s go back to that a little bit and talk about your journey to CSU from Carbondale.

Mike Katz: Carbondale, Colorado.

Amy Parsons: Right? Yep. And how you got your start as a student.

Mike Katz: Yeah. Well, I grew up in Carbondale, Colorado, which is a little mountain town on the western slope near, kind of in between Glenwood Springs and Aspen. And I always feel like an old man when I say things like this, but back in those days when I was growing up in Carbondale, it was very much a blue collar town. I mean, you were either a rancher or a coal miner or you worked in the service industry in Aspen. My parents moved there because they worked in the hospital in Glenwood Springs.

Mike Katz: And got this opportunity to grow up in this little mountain town. And it was fantastic and a awesome place to grow up in. I was really excited to stay in Colorado and go to school and move up to Fort Collins. For me, it was like moving to the big city. I was going from a one stoplight, 3,000 person town in Carbondale to like, wow, I’m in the big city in Fort Collins now. And when I was in Fort Collins my freshman year, I played on the club baseball team.

Amy Parsons: Oh, really?

Mike Katz: And I got injured my freshman year. I had to have surgery on my elbow.

Amy Parsons: Oh, man.

Mike Katz: And I tried to make a comeback my sophomore year and then injured my shoulder and then I had to go get a job. And right at that time, down on Harmony and College, they had just opened, again, this really starts dating the years on this thing. They’d opened a brand new Circuit City.

Amy Parsons: Circuit City, yep.

Mike Katz: And I went and applied for a job and got a job at Circuit City. And right at that time, this little tiny regional brand-new cell phone company called Voicestream Wireless had just launched in Colorado and Circuit City happened to be one of the distributors. And so I got this job and was selling Voicestream phones inside Circuit City. And while I was there, there was a gentleman who also happens to be a CSU alum. His name’s Jeff Wilson, who was a employee of Voicestream, and he was the guy that covered that area of Colorado.

Mike Katz: And we kind of befriended each other. And when I left after the second semester to go home, he called me in the summer and said, hey, when you come back, do you want to work for Voicestream? And this was my end of sophomore, going into my junior year of college. And I came back and he offered me this job and I was expecting it was like a job that I could do for the whole year while I was in school because I actually needed to feed myself while I was at school, and the job was a seasonal, part-time job.

Mike Katz: So he’s like, okay, you’re going to come in and we’ll guarantee you can work for eight weeks and then we’ll see. And fortunately it turned from a seasonal job into after the holiday season they hired me part-time, but on a non-seasonal basis. And I did that job through the rest of college. So my last two years I did that job. When I graduated, it just happened to correspond with this little tiny cell phone company, Voicestream, expanding into a bunch of new markets. And one of the markets they were working on was Chicago. And I got this opportunity when I graduated to go take a full-time job in Chicago.

Mike Katz: So I packed up from what I thought was the big city, Fort Collins, and moved to an actual big city, which is Chicago.

Amy Parsons: Did you say, “Oh, this is the big city.”

Mike Katz: Yeah, and that was actually the big city. And then I was in Chicago for a year. I did the same thing again in California about a year later. And then since 2007, I’ve been here in Bellevue in headquarters for T-Mobile. So that’s like my 27-year journey in five minutes.

Amy Parsons: That’s such a great story. What an incredible start as a student, but what you’ve turned that into is amazing. And T-Mobile just had a record year. Best network in America, right?

Mike Katz: Yeah.

Amy Parsons: By Ookla. And it’s what you’ve overseen in innovation and growth and scale at T-Mobile has been pretty spectacular.

Mike Katz: Yeah, it’s been an amazing journey. And one of the things that’s kept me here as long as I have is, and you got to see a little bit of this yesterday, we have an unbelievable group of people and an unbelievable group of people that create an unbelievable culture. There’s a lot of companies that talk about, we’re going to be a company that puts the customer in the middle of things, and they have posters around their campus that say things like that. I’ve never seen a place that actually lives that more than this one. And that’s not just from our frontline teams who work with customers every single day, whether it’s in stores or in call centers, but it’s people here in these headquarters locations, too, who really think about everything that we’re going to do and how’s it going to affect the experience that customers have.

Mike Katz: And I bring that up because it is so marquee in our culture. That orientation. It just attracts a different kind of person. It retains a different kind of person. It causes us to promote different kind of people here. And at the end of the day, a lot of us, once you’re working full time, you end up spending more time at work than you do at home. And you want to be at a place that is fun to be at with people that you like and respect. And I’ve been so fortunate that I’ve been able to do that here for 27 years. And it’s really, for me, the fact that I get to work with a bunch of people that I get to learn a ton from that I like that I can come have fun and laugh with. It’s a really special place.

Amy Parsons: What do you think is some of the secret sauce of T-Mobile of being able to create that culture where some companies who just say that that’s the most important thing, but actually can’t create that day-to-day culture. How do you think that T-Mobile succeeds in doing that or some things that we can take away from that at other organizations?

Mike Katz: Yeah, I think it’s a couple things, and I won’t bore everybody with the long T-Mobile story, but for a lot of years T-Mobile was the underdog company. If you could just go back about 10 years ago, there were four big wireless companies in America and T-Mobile was four of four by a lot, by a lot. And a lot of people had written us off. We went through a period of losing hundreds of thousands of customers every single year. Our business was in a lot of trouble. And we had this big brand turnaround, and the company’s always been scrappy because we’ve been always historically been the smallest. And I’ll tell you, from 10 or 15 years ago, when we were four out of four to today where T-Mobile, if you look at us by market cap, T-Mobile is the largest telecommunications company of any kind in the world now.

Mike Katz: But the thing that hasn’t changed for us is that chip on our shoulder of being the underdog. And I personally think when you get to a company that’s had success like this one and is of its size, the biggest thing that will cause you to lose that position is losing that chip on your shoulder and not being — continue to be restless. And if there’s one word that describes T-Mobile, I think restless is a great one. We’re just never satisfied.

Mike Katz: We have a saying here of we won’t stop. And even when it’s going great and we’re the best, we really want it to be better and are pushing hard for it to be better. And I do think that creates a really special culture here because a lot of times companies get big and their job is to keep their head down and stay under the radar. It’s like, hey, we’re big. We just want to keep a target off our back and everybody leave us alone. And we’ve always had the opposite orientation. It’s like, hey, we’re big and we’re going to keep pushing to make things better for customers.

Amy Parsons: Yeah. Well you can see that and feel that when you’re around this campus, which it’s been great to be here the last couple days. And you see that, the we won’t stop, and that energy around, and I saw it in the room yesterday with the partnership meeting with CSU. Talk a bit about how you see partnerships like that because it’s a partnership that is just, it’s so amazing to me because you might think that it’s one thing about the network and about the phones and about that relationship, but what you all are making it is really something so different. Talk to me about what you see as sort of the power of those types of partnerships.

Mike Katz: Yeah, I mean, to me, there’s always one common denominator, at least for us when we do partnerships, and this is in our partnership with CSU or we have big partnerships in sports, like with Major League Baseball and Formula One, or we have big partnership with other big corporate partners like Delta Airlines. The common denominator in all of those is the partnerships always start with some big technology solution, solving some kind of problem for a partner.

Mike Katz: And I think in the case of CSU, I think there’s lots of different areas that we’ve been able to work together on. The more simple things like, hey, yeah, we’ll give everybody smartphones and people can use those, but some of the things that we were talking about yesterday, like agricultural solutions, where you’re using both our macro network, but now some of the satellite capabilities we have, to be able to monitor places all over the state that were very hard to reach before.

Mike Katz: I know I joked about lasers a second ago, but hearing the story about the amount of power consumption that happens in powering these lasers and having the kinds of capabilities that can be right there to give real-time feedback to people who have to manage these amazing or these really incredible power demands that you have for operating stuff like that.

Mike Katz: So I think they all start with a technology solution that’s either solving a problem or opening up an opportunity. So whether it’s Little League Baseball, if you go to Little League anywhere in America, you’ll see T-Mobile works with them on things like the Little League Home Run Derby, the actual Home Run Derby’s sponsored by T-Mobile. And if you watch that this year, it’s hard to miss the magenta at that thing. The players are sitting on magenta carpets, the balls are magenta.

Amy Parsons: Oh, wow.

Mike Katz: So I guess my point is, I think the best partnerships start with something that is mutually beneficial for both partners and solving a problem or opening up an opportunity, but then expand into a bunch of other facets. And that was one of the things that was really exciting to me about yesterday’s meeting is just the brainstorming and the kinds of things that we could do together.

Amy Parsons: I think the mirror of that is what makes a great partnership for CSU, because we’ll work with a lot of companies, too, that will be a sponsor to us or a vendor to us, and that’s a transactional relationship. But a true strategic partnership is what happened yesterday. It’s all that magic in the room. I mean, we’re a large, public research land-grant university. Student success is what we’re all about, the research success, the academic excellence. And when we have a partner who understands that mission and is looking at all the different ways that your technology can power that, then everybody knows it’s a partnership. It’s not just a transactional relationship. And we’ve got that with T-Mobile, thanks to you. And I think we’re really just getting started in a lot of different ways based on that conversation yesterday. It’s really exciting. Can you give us a little peek under the tent about what you’re most excited about with T-Mobile right now and going forward and where the company is headed?

Mike Katz: Geez, where do I start? You mentioned best network in your preamble. That’s one of the things I’m personally really excited about, having been here for a long time. And for many years we wouldn’t publicly have said this, but if we’re being honest with ourselves, a lot of the proposition of T-Mobile was, we are going to give you a great deal and you’re going to make some trade-offs on the network. You’re not going to get as good network as you will somewhere else, but you’re going to get a great deal. And for a long time, that was a successful proposition for our company. And if you look back to the generations of wireless, we’re now in the fifth generation of wireless and 5G on your phones. If you go back one generation to 4G, at the start of that 4G decade, T-Mobile was dead last. I mean, we were way behind everybody else.

Mike Katz: We were able to, by the end of the decade, kind of get within striking distance of everybody else, but still a little bit behind. We’ve really been able to use 5G. And the catalyst for what I’m about to say was, we did a combination with Sprint. We were able to use that combination to leapfrog everybody else from the 4G era into the 5G era. And to be able to, a couple months ago, stand on stage and announce that T-Mobile now has the best network in America. Again, for somebody that’s been here for a long time was something that I never thought that we would be able to do.

Mike Katz: And I’m really, really excited. I’m really excited about that moment for us. But like we were talking about before, in terms of the T-Mobile culture, the biggest mistake we can make is have that just be a point in time. And when you’re the best at something, the bigger challenge is how do you remain the best? And so one of the things I’m excited about is what we’re doing to both keep our lead in network. And then the other big challenge for us is how do we make people aware of it? Because one of the challenges or opportunities we have is, brands are kind of hard-to-move things. People’s perceptions about brands, they take a long time to evolve.

Mike Katz: And what we find in our business is we do actually have the best network. And that’s just not some insider guy saying that. Many third parties will say the same thing. But the perception by consumers of the T-Mobile network lags the contemporary reality. How do you bridge that gap? A big part of it is continuing to make sure we have the best network and we are doing some really cool, extraordinary things, a lot of them leveraging AI to help us determine where do we make our next investment in network. And historically, what operators like us have done is they’ve looked at where people live and they’re like, okay, a lot of people live here, so we’re going to put a tower here and we can cover it.

Mike Katz: What we’re doing is something a little bit different, and we call it customer-driven coverage. And we have a whole AI custom proprietary AI model that we built for this. We’re actually looking at where customers use the network. And traditionally if you said, hey, we’re going to improve coverage for customers in Denver, we’re going to build a site in Denver near where people in Denver live. What we’re finding now is if you want to improve the coverage experience for someone in Denver, you may actually need to build a site somewhere in the Western Slope. We’re looking at where customers use the network and travel and where they potentially don’t have a very good experience, but they live in Denver, but they have a bad experience wherever, in Telluride. And that Denver customer attributes their bad T-Mobile experience to Telluride even though they reside in Denver.

Mike Katz: And our model is now helping us say, okay, if we want to fix coverage for a bunch of people in Denver, you got to build out here. And it’s really changing how we deploy our network capital and the satisfaction that customers have with our network. So keeping our network lead is one big one, but then how do we communicate to people? And one of the things I’ve always hated about advertising in our industry is it’s always a bunch of big telecom companies talking about themselves. It’s like, hey, look how big our coverage map is and look at our map and we have the best network and look at our map. And one of the things that we’re trying to do is not do that, but talk about our network in the form of experiences and through the lived examples of customers.

Mike Katz: And if you see some of the recent network advertising that we’ve done, we actually partnered with Billy Bob Thornton and have an ad with him where he’s walking in an environment that is, he actually filmed it for us while he was filming season two of Landman. So he’s out where Landman gets filmed in the middle-of-nowhere Texas, in a place where it is like, wow, T-Mobile actually covers a place like this? And he’s talking about very specific experiences where he’s needed to be connected and where he can now be connected. And we did a similar, another ad for the All-Star game for baseball this year, where you had multiple players in… one of them was on a farm throwing baseballs, it’s Paul Skenes throwing baseballs at bottles. You had another person in a pasture, Cal Raleigh was hitting baseballs. All live-streaming themselves doing it.

Mike Katz: And the whole idea is, in our lives now, we want to and have an expectation of being connected everywhere, and that includes remote areas that haven’t historically been covered. And so to be able to dramatize that and show why is it important to have coverage, because I’m living my life in these areas and I want to share it with people. And so we’re trying to bring that a little bit more into our advertising, as well. So that’s a really long-winded way of saying at the end of the day, our core product is network. And I’m really excited about where our network is, and I’m excited about helping people understand that we have the best network solution now for them and bridging that gap between people’s perception and the actual reality of the product.

Amy Parsons: Yeah, that’s terrific. And it’s going to be really fun to see where you take it in the next few years with this and that brand turnaround and that perception of it. And I know just from being here on this campus, you’re hiring a lot of really talented people across the board in all different positions, a lot of talented young people. And think through for us what you look at, because we’re trying to produce the next generation of talent. We’re so proud that you’re a Ram, that you came out of CSU. We want to keep producing that leadership out of CSU, who’s ready to innovate, ready to work, ready to come into these companies and take it to the next level. What advice would you have for sort of today’s college students as they want to follow a career path similar to what you have and to get into these industries?

Mike Katz: Yeah, I love this question because I can give advice to maybe people that will actually listen to me. Because I try to give it to my own kids and they never listen to me. So what I would say, one of the things I see from a lot of students that are graduating and starting to get into the workforce for the first time is oftentimes people have a very structured, very linear plan for themselves. And it’s like, hey, I want to do X and to get to X, I’ve got to do A, then B, then C. And I’m not going to consider anything that deviates from that whatsoever. And the reality is that’s not the way careers work at all. And one of the pieces of advice that I just gave to our interns that were here is you’ve got to think about your career in a non-linear manner.

Mike Katz: And you don’t want to dismiss potential unexpected opportunities because you’ve got a career plan in your head all figured out. And I can tell you from my career, some of the best things that I ever did were the most unexpected ones. It was the hey, somebody tapped me on the shoulder and said, hey, I’d really like you to consider doing this thing, something that I had never considered before. And if I hadn’t done it, there’s no way I would’ve gotten to the next job. And I think kids that are coming out of school into the workforce need to think about, and be open to the idea, of the unexpected opportunities and be willing to take a little bit of risk and bet on themselves.

Mike Katz: And honestly, if the next job that they take or you take doesn’t scare you a little bit, then you probably didn’t do the right one. But I think not being so close-minded to opportunities that were different than what your plan was, I think is important. And oftentimes you’ll be surprised at where those opportunities can lead you.

Amy Parsons: Yeah, that’s great advice. Taking big swings and betting on themselves. Well, we appreciate you being a role model for CSU students, and they’ll be listening to this advice and looking to you and your career path, and we appreciate you staying connected to the university and supporting CSU. I guess I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that another reason that we’re in Seattle is because we’re playing football tomorrow. We’re here for our first game of the season against University of Washington, and I think you’re coming to the game and will be cheering us on at CSU. So that’s exciting, as well.

Mike Katz: It’s so great. I mean, it’s so exciting to kick off the season here in my hometown, very selfishly for me, but also it’s been really cool to see the last couple years, these big, marquee matchups, right at the beginning of the season that put CSU on a big national stage. And I would love nothing more for CSU to come in and just whoop these Huskies. It would be so great.

Amy Parsons: Yeah, these games are a little bit terrifying, especially right here at the start. But I am really excited to be playing football here tomorrow, and it’s going to be a lot of fun. So thanks again for hosting me, for being such a great Ram and for hosting the whole CSU team. We’re so excited about this partnership with T-Mobile and where we’re going to take it. And maybe you and I can do this again in a year and see where we are.

Mike Katz: I’d love that. And thank you to you and your leadership. It’s been amazing from afar watching what you’ve done with this university. And the last time I was on campus, just being so proud, that that’s the place that I went to school. And just watching the evolution from even the facades of the buildings look amazing. And that’s just the start, the stadium on campus. And I looked at my old dorm, I was like, man, that looks a lot nicer than when I went to school here. It’s just incredible. And then hearing some of the amazing research and technology that have come into school, everybody that goes there today, and everybody that’s an alum should be incredibly proud of you and your leadership team and what they’re doing at the university.

Amy Parsons: Well, thank you. Thanks so much. I appreciate that. We’ll get out there and cheer them on tomorrow on the field. Yeah. All right.

Mike Katz: Yeah. Thank you.

Amy Parsons: Thanks, Mike. Go Rams.

Mike Katz: Yeah.

Amy Parsons: Thank you for listening. I’m Amy Parsons, president of Colorado State University, and you’re listening to CSU’s The Next 150, where we explore what comes next for CSU by chatting with change makers who are already leading the charge and shaping our next 150 years. I’m gathering their very best advice for today’s CSU students. Stay tuned to wherever you get podcasts for our next outstanding conversation. Go Rams.