Originally Broadcast: August 30, 2025
Host Jon Radoff sits down with Amir Haleem, CEO and co-founder of Helium, to discuss how decentralized wireless is breaking free from the gravity of traditional telecom. From the origins of the People's Network (2013 launch, crypto-incentivized model in 2017, rebrand to Nova Labs and Helium Mobile launch) to the token-based hotspot incentives (HNT rewards), we explore the technology, economics, and bold vision behind a community-powered alternative to centralized infrastructure
Decentralized Tech Livestream: Hello and welcome back everybody. This is the decentralized tech live stream. I am John
Jon Radoff: Radoth. I am one of the founders and the CEO of a company called Beamable. We create a tech stack for all of the back end and game server, social systems, economic systems, all the stuff, all the kind of boring stuff, frankly, that you need to run a game so that game developers can do the fun stuff like things people actually care about. But you need this today to run a game and we're launching a deep in around it. And I'm super excited today because we have the deep in of deep with us in the room. So this is going to be a really fun conversation. Let's just cut right over to you, Amir. Can we start with yourself and your own intro and as I understand it, gaming is part of the backstory here as well, even though maybe not for helium specifically. Yeah, I'm
Decentralized Tech Livestream: Amir obviously started helium in 2013. Helium is a decentralized wireless network, launched originally to focus on sensors and what has become known as the Internet of Things. And eventually now has grown beyond IoT and is now focused also on mobile networks and a bunch of other stuff coming in the future. But yeah, I was in the gaming world for a very long time. I dropped out of college and worked at a company called DICE. We built Battlefield 1942. I was also one of the, I was a world champion quake, quake 3, and Unreal Tournament player at some point in my life. So I was one of the first sort of esports pros on the Western side of the world. It was all very big in Korea at the time and there was no one in the West. So yeah, I appreciate what you got what you're doing with Beamable and have quite a lot of experience in that industry.
Jon Radoff: Yeah, exciting. We look forward to the day when games like Battlefield run on top of Beamable. So that would be exciting. Amir, let's dive right into helium though. So I think a lot of the folks who watch this program for me regularly have heard of helium for sure. So, but maybe for that 1% of the people that don't know yet, maybe just a slightly expanded introduction. But then I really want to understand the backstory. How did this come to be, then how did it come to be what it is
Decentralized Tech Livestream: right now? Yeah, that's, I mean, I'll just tie that all together. In 2013, I started the company
Decentralized Tech Livestream: with Sean Fanning from Napster. And the problem at the time that we were trying to solve is that we
Decentralized Tech Livestream: had a bunch of friends that were building hardware products. So we had one friend that was building like a Fitbit for babies. And we had another guy that was doing people tracking in retail areas. And they all were complaining about the same thing, which is like we have a bunch of these sensors. And we think we have a really interesting business opportunity. But there's no way for us to actually like build the thing. Because if I wanted to deploy 100,000 sensors, it's going to cost me $30 million a month in cell phone bills. And so that was like actually the sort of genesis of helium was friends who had a particular problem. And then we were trying to help the Fitbit for babies, for example, that needed to work when it was far away from a phone. But it also needed to be really small. And it also really needed to run on a small battery. And so all of this stuff was sort really what kind of caused us to start looking at it. And the internet of things was very nascent. We're starting just, we're starting to become a term that that people used and DCS, especially used. And so we founded helium really to try and solve the problem of like how do you connect small things to the internet? But basically that was the real purpose of helium at its launch.