Profile / Broadband & Workforce
Maria Popo
She studies how people learn for a living. Now she's teaching the entire cable industry to do it faster - as the first woman to run SCTE.
Maria Popo // President & CEO, SCTE
She studies how people learn for a living. Now she's teaching the entire cable industry to do it faster - as the first woman to run SCTE.
Most executives collect titles. Maria Popo collected a question: why do some people climb the career ladder and others stall on the first rung? She had reason to wonder. She started her own working life answering phones as a customer service representative, with a trade-school certificate and a knack for technology she hadn't yet been told was valuable.
That question followed her up every step - through fiber optic connectors, cable modems, and a Fortune 50 manufacturing floor. Then, after decades as a senior technology executive, she did something most people her seniority never do. She enrolled at Stanford and earned a master's in Learning Design and Technology, as a Distinguished Careers Institute fellow. She went back to the classroom to study the thing she'd been living.
Today Popo is president and CEO of SCTE, the standards and training body that quietly keeps broadband running, now a subsidiary of CableLabs. She is the first woman to hold the role, taking the helm in late 2023 after the retirement of long-time leader Mark Dzuban. Her job is not abstract. SCTE certifies the technicians who install fiber, maintain networks, and keep the internet flowing into tens of millions of homes. Popo runs its global network of more than 60 chapters - and she's spent her tenure rewiring how that network teaches.
Her resume reads like a map of how broadband actually got built. She began at Dorran Photonics, a fiber optic connector startup that 3M Telecom would acquire. At 3M she moved between technical and non-technical roles - product management, technical services - learning the business from the inside of the lab and the front of the room both.
At 3Com she helped bring the first generation of cable modems to market, the unglamorous boxes that turned television wire into internet. When 3Com exited the business, Popo helped transform that exit into a billion-dollar startup story at Ambit Microsystems. She went on to serve as VP Cable at Foxconn, the world's largest electronics manufacturer, then as president and CEO of Ubee Interactive Americas, where she built DOCSIS modems and pioneered some of the industry's first wireless cable and voice modems.
Each move added a layer: engineer, marketer, operator, executive. The trade-school kid kept showing up with more range than the room expected.
I was always interested in the workforce aspect because of that, thinking, why do some people go to college or not go to college?
It gave me an opportunity to see how you work your way up through the career ladder and how exposing yourself to technology actually really, really helps you.
How do we help the chapters reach out to high schools, reach out to community colleges, trade schools?
Digital adaptability is a flex skill that's coming. That's the ability to learn digital tools more quickly than ever.
Her first priority at SCTE was a more focused course catalog - cutting clutter so technicians learn what the network actually needs, faster.
She wants SCTE's chapters talking to high schools, community colleges and trade schools - the places she came from - to widen the front door into the industry.
Drawing on her Stanford research into sociotechnical workplace skills, she's betting on digital adaptability as the trait that separates futureproof workers from the rest.
She studies how people learn for a living - then applied it to herself, going back to Stanford mid-career to earn a master's.
She helped ship some of the first cable modems - the boxes that quietly put broadband into millions of homes.
One career spanning a fiber optics startup, a Fortune 50 manufacturer, and the cable industry's standards body.
A Denver-area trail runner who treats the long climb as both a hobby and a metaphor.