How Frank Mong and Helium are flipping roaming fees, random Wi-Fi access and crypto into a people-powered telecom movement.

When you sign up for an international plan, you're not paying $12/day to roam. You’re paying a stupidity tax on a 150-year-old telecom system that still thinks “international travel” is a luxury edge case. That's just one of the many ways the exisiting telecom monopoly works for the companies, not the users.

Helium’s bet is simple: what if the next great network isn’t owned by telcos at all, but by all of us?

Frank Mong on CLIMB

Frank Mong is the COO of Nova Labs, the company behind Helium and HNT, a decentralized wireless network that pays regular people and venues for providing coverage. Since joining in 2017, he’s helped take Helium from weird IoT side quest to global telecom challenger with hundreds of thousands of mobile subscribers and partners like T-Mobile, AT&T, Google Fi, and Telefónica.

Before Helium, Frank spent 25 years in cybersecurity, watching every way the internet can go wrong. Now he’s trying to rebuild one of the world’s biggest industries with crypto incentives, cheap hotspots, and a grassroots army of internet nerds, airports, and bagel shops.

People-Powered Networks Can Eat Big Telecom

Helium is going after the $3–4 trillion global telco market with a simple flip: let people build and own the network, and let carriers tap into it instead of spending billions on more towers.

At its core, Helium is:

• HNT, the token that rewards people and venues for sharing their internet

• The Helium network, which stitches those hotspots into real coverage

• Services on top, like Helium Mobile and carriers using Helium as an offload layer

Instead of more steel in the ground, Helium links fragmented Wi-Fi—restaurants, airports, stadiums—into one seamless network your phone can hop onto automatically.

Key Takeaways

1. A $250 box that turns your Wi-Fi into a mini-telco

• For small venues, Helium is plug-and-play: buy a ~$250 hotspot, connect it to your existing internet, and you’re live. No new ISP, no splash pages, and customers auto-connect securely via their SIM.

• Frank tells the story of a tiny NYC restaurant buried in concrete with zero signal—until the owner heard there was crypto upside. She didn’t know what HNT was, only that “maybe it’ll go up.” She bought the box, and now customers can finally scan QR menus and post brunch pics without begging for the password.

2. Telcos aren’t buying visibility through partnership with Helium

• Helium doesn’t just provide cheap bits. By running in thousands of venues (think airports with hundreds of nodes), the network can see how each location actually performs: reliability, capacity, usage, uptime.

• Traditional carriers only see their own towers. With Helium, they get “AI for Wi-Fi”—data they can use to route traffic more intelligently. Venues get paid per gigabyte; Nova Labs monetizes the intelligence layer on top.

3. Crypto isn’t a gimmick for Helium. It’s about aligning incentive design

• “Share your internet” has been tried before. “Share your internet and earn something that might 10x” hits very differently.

• HNT adds upside to what would otherwise be a boring fixed payout. That maps directly to how entrepreneurs think: take a little risk now (buy the hotspot, share bandwidth) for asymmetric upside later. That’s why owners who can’t explain Helium still say, “I want the crypto.”

4. Startup lesson: Stay alive long enough to get lucky

• Frank is blunt about how close Helium came to not working. Early hardware bets whiffed, they swapped radio tech under runway pressure, and nothing was “obvious” at the time.

• His hiring rule: avoid playbook people; hire smart hackers who’ll experiment, break things, and learn in public. Layer on Helium investor Vinod Khosla’s line—“You just need to stay alive long enough to get lucky”—and you get Helium’s culture: lots of small bets, lots of small failures, and one audacious attempt to rewrite how telecom works.

If you’ve ever cursed a roaming bill, watched your signal die at a stadium, or stood over a dead QR menu, this conversation will feel uncomfortably familiar in a good way.

You’ll hear how Helium actually works under the hood, why big carriers are quietly plugging in, and what it takes to build a people-powered network in a multitrillion-dollar market. H

it play on the full episode with Frank and decide for yourself if he is optimistically delusional… or building something truly inevitable.