On the roof of Amazon’s campus in Santa Barbara, with the Palm Tree Music Festival only days away, Mark Sieglock, the Executive Vice President of Software and Services at eero, is focused on one thing: keeping people connected.
For Sieglock and the eero team, this festival represents the future of hospitality, where internet reliability shapes everything from guest experiences to business operations.
Shawn Walchef, host of Digital Hospitality and founder of Cali BBQ Media, put it plainly: “The crazy thing for me is that we’ve been doing the show for so long, but the show exists because of wifi. It exists because of connectivity.”
Sieglock has been with eero for ten years, joining before the company shipped its first product. Since its first product launch in 2016, eero has expanded to tens of millions of homes and businesses in 28 countries while staying focused on its original mission of delivering connectivity, coverage, reliability, and security.
That mission matters for restaurants more than ever. Operators today rely on networks to process delivery orders, run point of sale systems, send tickets to the kitchen, manage cameras, and support customer wifi. Many do not realize how fragile their setups are until something fails.
One of eero’s earliest restaurant deployments was with the Delfina Restaurant Group in San Francisco. Sieglock quickly learned how much pressure restaurant networks carry behind the scenes. “The environments are really tech heavy,” he said. “Restaurants have everything wired in, from printers to point of sale. They have allowed listing of IP addresses so that point of sale systems stay safe. They have customer wifi, employee wifi, system wifi.”
eero’s focus on simplicity is one reason operators trust the brand. Early in the company’s development, employees were required to test the setup process with people who typically struggle with new technology, like their parents or grandparents. Sieglock still laughs about the moment he knew the product was ready.
“I went over to my grandma’s house. I took it over, she set up four eero devices in her house,” he said. “It took my grandma about 20 minutes, but she did it in a two story house, walked around, set up all the eero’s.”
That mentality extends to design, packaging, and the app experience. Sieglock describes eero’s process as living with the product, scrutinizing every detail, and refining until the experience is as clear and approachable as possible.
Amazon integrations have also helped eero innovate across the customer journey. “We launched eero built-in to Alexa,” Sieglock explained. “We use those antennas to extend the coverage of those homes if they already had eero in it.”
One of eero’s most important developments for hospitality is eero Signal, a cellular backup module that prevents outages. Sieglock explained how it works: “If the main, primary internet connection goes down, it’ll take over and then it’ll feed the cellular signal back through the entire system, and keep your network up and running so you have no downtime.”
Support is another key advantage. Sieglock shared the impact: “If you put an eero system in, your calls go down by half.” And if issues occur, “We have a 97 percent first time success resolution rate.”
What stands out most is eero’s commitment to listening to customer feedback. Sieglock and his team spend time inside restaurants, backstage at festivals, and in the field to understand what operators actually need. “Our job is not to tell you what your problems are,” he said. “You know them a lot better than us.”
Sieglock encourages operators not to be intimidated by the idea of upgrading your network. “Don’t be afraid to ask for help,” he said. “If you’re like, ‘Hey, I want to buy this. This seems like something that I could use for my home or for my restaurant or business, but I don’t really want to undo things,’ just call us, we’ll help you with setup over the phone as well.”
For restaurants, festivals, and hospitality operators, eero’s message is simple: reliable connectivity is the foundation of modern hospitality, and those who invest in it will be ready for what comes next.
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