Long before anyone talked about managed WiFi as a critical piece of multifamily housing infrastructure, Dan Myers was already building technology to solve problems nobody else knew how to fix.

His path to founding DojoNetworks wasn't the typical startup story. There was no business plan. There was just a kid in high school connecting hard drives with ribbon cables, flat 50-pin connectors you'd find inside computer towers, sharing data between machines when relational databases didn't exist yet.

The economics of that era were brutal. A 5-megabyte hard drive cost $5,000. When you needed multiple computers to access the same data, you built the entire database stack yourself, from hardware to software. There was no MySQL, no PostgreSQL, no off-the-shelf solution. You made it work or you made something else work.

By the 1990s, Myers had evolved the problem set. He was building database-driven websites for a digital agency when his corporate clients kept asking the same question: "How do we actually get online?" In a recent episode of Beyond the Cable, hosted by Brad Randall and produced in association with Broadband Communities, Myers shared the experiences that shaped DojoNetworks.

The ISP Nobody Planned to Build

The digital agency became an ISP out of necessity, not ambition. Around 1995-96, Myers saw the constraint: dial-up couldn't cut it, fiber didn't exist in his market, and the incumbents, cable companies, phone lines, T1/T3 carriers, had locked everyone else out.

So he started experimenting with wireless. He and his team began beaming bandwidth rooftop to rooftop, towers down to customers. By 1998, his company was one of the first five wireless ISPs in the world, long before "wireless broadband" was a category with venture capital behind it.

"We built an ISP to solve an issue, not to build a business," Myers said. "It was solving a problem, and it turned into this."

That's the recurring theme that matters: Myers doesn't start businesses. He starts solving problems, and businesses emerge from solving them well enough that customers want more.

He also built what became DoorDash in 1998, local food delivery for his State College, Pennsylvania market, before the idea was nationally venture-backed. He built search engines, ad networks, and a city portal, statecollege.com, that actually displaced the local newspaper and yellow pages. None of these were ventures designed to scale nationally. They were solutions to local problems that worked.

The Density Problem

What took Myers from business internet into multifamily housing was geography, not strategy.

His ISP was already on the rooftops of local businesses. Then the team started climbing the rooftops of student housing buildings, the same buildings where his company needed to install wireless infrastructure. That's when the math changed.

One building. One hundred potential customers. How do you not chase that?

"I went to the owners of those buildings and said, 'Hey, can we sell it to your residents?'" Myers recalled. The answer was yes. His company started competing against the local cable provider, Windstream, and Verizon, taking 40% market share inside those properties by the force of actually showing up.

Then he had the conversation that mattered: "Hey, can we come in and rewire your building? We'll need a bulk contract."

That became the model. One bulk contract led to another. Today, in the original market where Myers started, DojoNetworks serves about 95% of the apartment doors with bulk managed WiFi. That's not market penetration. That's market ownership.

But bulk internet wasn't the endgame either. It was solving the problem of how to get reliable connectivity into dense residential environments. WiFi would create a different problem entirely.

The Wireless Interference Nightmare

When WiFi started appearing in residential buildings in 2003-04, the physics was not kind to apartment dwellers.

Apartment A bought a powerful router. Apartment B bought a more powerful router. Apartment C's internet stopped working because the interference made the connection unusable. The support tickets piled up. Residents were frustrated. The network was unusable not because of backhaul, but because hundreds of neighbors' WiFi equipment was fighting for the same radio spectrum.

This was a dense-environment problem. You couldn't solve it with better routers or stronger signals. You needed to manage the RF environment itself.

Myers' team tried managing this problem in 2015 with access points and home routers that could at least talk to each other. The approach helped but was fragile. Then Myers found a way to deploy true managed WiFi, access points throughout the building, RF management in the cloud, centralized control of the wireless environment.

"The support tickets went away," Myers said. "The customers started working."

He started iterating on the technology, deploying it across the portfolio, and watching what broke. A lot of companies ship technology and fix it later. Myers had been running networks that needed "five nines of reliability," 99.999% uptime, for business customers since the ISP's earliest days. The tolerance for broken was zero.

That philosophy carried into managed WiFi: build it right, test it hard, deploy it when you're confident, then support it relentlessly.

What Dojo Became

Today, DojoNetworks serves approximately 50,000 apartment doors across 33 states. The company employs 39 people. Five or six work in the original State College office. The rest are scattered across Seattle, Miami, Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina, and everywhere in between.

The scale is real but not massive. That's deliberate.

The managed WiFi problem has matured. So have Dojo's competitors. What separates Dojo from companies trying to copy the playbook isn't the technology anymore. It's what Myers calls "the culture we've developed."

Every Monday morning and Thursday afternoon, the entire company gets on a Zoom call. This started during COVID and stuck. Sales talks about what's happening in sales. Support talks about what's happening in support. Engineering talks about what's happening in engineering. There are no silos. Everybody rows in the same direction because everybody knows what the other boats are doing.

"There's lots of technology in our business," Myers said, "but we're 99.6% a service and support company."

The technology has to work. That's table stakes. What matters is the service layer, being open and transparent with customers, understanding their problems, solving them, and then telling customers what you fixed and when. That's not a marketing claim. It's the operational reality.

Every new employee reads "Knock Your Socks Off Service" during onboarding. It's not because Myers is sentimental. It's because customer service isn't something you do after you finish the technical work. It's woven into how Dojo operates from engineering to support to leadership.

"We're all aligned a little bit," Myers said, "from me all the way down to the newest hire."

Solving Unique Problems: The Pine Hills Example

The architecture of a managed WiFi deployment matters when you encounter specific constraints. The Pine Hills property in Massachusetts presented several: new construction, extremely high device density, residents with dozens of connected devices, and regulatory constraints.

Massachusetts law prevented the property owner from requiring residents to pay for WiFi, so Dojo deployed a hybrid model where the network covers the entire property and residents choose whether to buy into the service, with revenue shared back to ownership from resident signups.

The fiber circuit, the connection between the building and the internet backbone, is always the bottleneck. Fiber providers can take six months, nine months, even 12 months depending on permits and infrastructure. Dojo's approach was to accelerate the infrastructure piece, having equipment on hand in a warehouse and deploying it rapidly once the site was ready.

This is the difference between a company with a playbook and a company that ships. Dojo had deployed enough networks to predict what would work and had the gear ready.

Still Solving the Same Problem

The technology Dan Myers works with today looks nothing like ribbon cables and early databases. The problems are different. But the philosophy is identical: find a problem that matters, understand it deeply, build something that solves it, and keep iterating until it actually works.

Dojo's future is more of the same pattern. More multifamily portfolios. Continued refinement of managed WiFi. Solving increasingly complex connectivity environments where device density keeps climbing, interference keeps becoming more sophisticated, and reliability keeps becoming more critical.

The differentiator is still the human layer: the live support that picks up when something breaks, the onboarding that makes sure residents actually know how to connect, and the operational transparency that keeps customers confident Dojo is solving their problem, not selling them something that sounds good in a pitch.

That's the thing about building technology to solve real problems. You can't fake the support. You can't cut corners on reliability. And you can't hide from customers when something breaks. You have to actually fix it.

Myers has been doing that since 1998. The tools have changed. The philosophy hasn't.

You can watch the entire video here.