Chief Operating Officer & Director, IRIDIUM COMMUNICATIONS INC
Creating business value while connecting the world: Suzie McBride and Greg Pelton of Iridium
In this frank interview, Suzi McBride, Chief Operating Officer & Board Member, and Greg Pelton Chief Technology Officer, of global ...
About Suzanne Mcbride
Suzi McBride, Chief Operating Officer and Director of Iridium, has participated in several interviews in 2024 and 2025 discussing the company’s strategy and her career. She described Iridium as a company focused on innovation and being prepared to pivot as the market evolves, noting that it is difficult to predict what 2035 will look like. McBride emphasized that Iridium’s business model is not about selling a low-cost, vanilla service, but rather a highly differentiated network. She highlighted a new project to connect standard cellular devices to satellite networks, calling it a "new concept in the industry" that no one has done at scale yet, and described it as "incredibly transformational" and a "tremendous opportunity." McBride also discussed the importance of owning intellectual property, calling it "the keys to the kingdom" and critical for competitive advantage. She noted that Iridium’s supply chain team performed well during the COVID-19 pandemic and that the company has balanced just-in-time inventory with risk management. In a 2024 interview, she stated that Iridium is the "original constellation company" and has evolved from a businessman’s telephone system to support IoT, maritime, and broadband markets. She also commented on the Satelles acquisition, saying the biggest challenge is addressing the reliance on GPS in banking and communications, and that Iridium’s broadcasting signal is about 1,000 times stronger than GPS, making it suitable for critical infrastructure.
Transcript (21 segments)
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Interviewer0:04
It's great to have you both back here in Cambridge. You are regular visitors to our labs here. How does it feel to be back again?
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Suzanne Mcbride0:12
Oh, it's always like coming home. It's fun. We know that we've been working with the team for a long time. So, the jet lag kind of kills us sometimes, but it's good.
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Greg0:22
I find it interesting because we work so closely as a team. Every day we're together on video and collaborating on different projects and meetings, but every time we come back there's something new to see because you have so many things going on here. This is our network and our business is core to what we do. You guys have a portfolio that's much broader than that. So, I always learn something new and interesting that's going on.
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Interviewer0:46
As you mentioned, Susie, we've been working together for quite a while, over 20 years now. How would you describe the evolution of the relationship between our two companies?
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Suzanne Mcbride0:56
It started almost 20 years ago to do our 9505, which is the first handset we had that Motorola had built. When Iridium took over the entire business, coming from a bankruptcy and trying to rebuild the team, I heard we needed somebody who could help us take an old design and figure out how to recreate it and do something of our own. That's where we found you guys as experts to help us do some backward engineering and figure out what our new products would be. We started as just replacing this one product, and now it has morphed over the years to where you guys really are part of our team. I think of you as an extension of Iridium. You're part of our engineering and R&D teams to look at new products for our customers. We've moved from end products all the way down to transceivers, chipsets, and even waveform technologies. You have helped us in all of those transformations and innovations around new products and services for our company in our different marketplaces.
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Greg2:02
Obviously, my window is a lot narrower than Susie's, but I remember the first time I came in for a meeting and met the team. We were talking about a particular project that was underway, and it was a lot of details because we were trying to solve some key problems late in the process. That was the first view, but as we moved to new things we started talking about working on, I realized the capability that was here. While you were helping us complete a project, your strength is really on the front end, and we need to leverage that a lot more. As I left, I said I want you guys helping us solve our most important problems. You're great at that, and that's where we've been partnering strongly together. It's beneficial that you can not just help solve the problems but help us take it all the way to market too.
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Interviewer2:57
As part of this, we have been at the very heart of Iridium's technology. What for you do you think is the importance of that highly innovative technology to Iridium?
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Suzanne Mcbride3:10
It's important. If you think back to where Iridium started, it was an idea that you could build a satellite network that was global, allowing a person to go anywhere in the world and have access to communications. They could talk to their loved ones, do business. That was a transformational notion and almost impossible. I'll share an anecdote because we've gone through steps of evolving that technology and creating new capabilities. We're currently working on one together right now that is incredibly transformational: supporting cellular devices connecting to satellite networks. This is a new concept in the industry. There's some work going on, but no one has done it at scale or very well yet, and we have this opportunity to do it. Two years ago, we said to ourselves, 'Is this possible? Could we even do this? It's a cool idea.' Through some study and joint work, we realized we could actually do it. In the last year, we launched the project and have been working like crazy. We want to get to market as fast as possible because there's tremendous demand from partners and customers, and it's working really, really well. We're doing the impossible today, and that's incredibly exciting.
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Greg4:22
I think it's part of our DNA. Iridium is very much who we are. As Greg pointed out, I was actually part of the Motorola team in the 90s trying to figure out how to launch satellites quickly. It was unheard of. Even after we launched and had the amazing regulatory items, everything was impressive looking back at what we created. But it was really built for a business person to take their phones everywhere in the world because back then they didn't have roaming or the ability to use your cell phone from the United States when you came to the UK. Obviously that changed over time, so when the Iridium that I work for now took over, we had to create new ways of approaching this. It was a very different business case. Innovation has been in our bones, going into short burst data messaging and IoT markets, and creating that, and even to our most recent one. You guys had a big challenge because it wasn't just how we were going to do this. This was built on satellite, designed in the 2010 to 2017 time period. How do we take something several years old that's flying and create an innovative solution that was never thought of? Part of our thinking in the 2010s when designing the next system was to create a system that is flexible because we don't know what the future holds. That's key to who we are, and we'll have to continue to do that. It's a very competitive market with lots of changes happening right now, so it's important we continue to keep that innovation going.
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Interviewer5:55
How important would you say CC has been in unlocking the potential of the system?
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Suzanne Mcbride6:02
I think you guys have been critical. We have a lot of deep experts in our network, but like every company, we tend to be focused on what we do: our market, our technology, our platform. There are issues for customers we have to solve every day. We don't spend enough time looking out at what's happening in the rest of the world. As a CTO, it's important to open the doors and see what's happening in the rest of the industry and other industries, what's going on with technology trends. You guys are a window to that for us. I could pour through websites every day trying to get this information, but you are deeply involved in these technologies, so you bring a lot of great ideas to us. We can look at how to bring concepts and technologies from adjacent markets into ours. We recently did a strategic workshop this past October that was fantastic, looking at the future. A lot of those experts get pulled out, and it's also educational for our team to learn more about looking outward. You challenge us with good questions to make us think, because we get focused on where we think we want to go. Bringing that brainstorming expertise and leading us through the process has been instrumental in focusing on what we want to do going forward and where the opportunities are.
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Greg7:21
To build on what Susie said, this workshop and a lot of our discussions about the future aren't just grounded on what the technology options are. You really want to start from what's happening in the industry, the market, the technology trends, what competitors are doing. You have to lay out that whole landscape and say, 'How do we navigate across that landscape? What are the technologies and capabilities we can leverage to be the most successful and stay true to our mission and value proposition?' That's tricky. It takes more than just technology experts; it takes a consultative approach to go down that journey with us.
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Interviewer8:00
And as we take on board the new ideas and they turn into actual projects to deliver actual capability, how important is it that you own the IP at the end of this?
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Suzanne Mcbride8:13
You have to. IP is the key to your differentiation ongoing. We don't sell a vanilla service at the lowest cost; that's not our business model. We're a highly differentiated network and service, so IP is critical.
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Greg8:32
I would say those are the keys to the kingdom. This is what runs our business. It's critical for our competitive advantage, and to help us understand what is the critical piece we need to own versus what's not as important. Working with you, you are wonderful about ensuring we do own and control our IP because you understand it's our business and we need to control it. It's been a good partnership that way, and that was one of the goals anytime we do business with partners: who owns the IP and where are the right lines. For us, it's very clear and easy.
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Interviewer9:10
For us, it's quite simple. We work for clients such as Iridium, so you get to own the IP, and I think that's right. We have a really recent win. I brought a little show and tell. I'm really proud of our latest product: the Iridium 9704, which is a certise-based IoT product. We've done a lot of transceiver devices over the years. You helped us redesign existing ones and create new ones, but this was a vision by our team and your team to come with the right out-of-the-box solution. You can give it to anybody off the street—well, not anybody, but pretty much anybody who can grab some solutions, plug and play, and start developing a solution. For us, it's about enabling our partners to go fast, not having to have their entire engineering or IT team to connect and get their systems up and running, especially when they want to do an R&D product quickly. This developer kit was done with that vision of being fast and creative. I'm really proud of the team. It's about taking a hard problem and saying to the team, 'The vision is we want this to be the best product, super easy for anybody to use, whether you're a startup or a big established company, so you can take it, put things together, and within minutes or hours, you can actually test a solution.'
What's next for Iridium?
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Suzanne Mcbride10:48
I'm focused on the near-term, which is delivering this new project we're working on together. I think that's going to really change what we can offer to the market. Rather than just the devices we build together and sell to our partners, we can take any cellular device and connect it to our network. That's going to open whole new opportunities at different price points, different kinds of services, and different kinds of partnerships. There are billions of cellular devices in the market, and only a couple million of our devices, so that's tremendous opportunity for all of us.
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Greg11:21
You hit it well. We are already starting to think about the future in the 2030s and beyond, what the next constellation will look like. But it's really more about the business at the end of the day: what services we need to provide. I get asked that question a lot, and my answer mostly is we don't know yet. There's so much that has changed over the years and will continue to change. It goes back to the core of who we both are as companies: innovation and being prepared to make the pivots and shifts that are needed. Seeing how the world evolves in the next 10 to 15 years, it's really hard to predict exactly what 2035 will look like. It's about ensuring that what we're building today and tomorrow will enable the ability to do those shifts, because we can watch and see what the need is and where the business cases are going. That's more important to me: not just the what, but the how we're going to get there, ensuring that every step we take keeps that openness for the future.
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Interviewer12:22
Thank you, Susie and Greg, for taking the time today to talk through some of the fun and challenges we work together on. Most of all, thank you for spending a bit of time with me today. It's very much appreciated. I wish you both huge success with Iridium in the coming years.
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Suzanne Mcbride12:45
Thanks for having us. You'll be part of our future too, so we'll see you again.