Michael D. Gianni knows what holds a network together.

Michael D. Gianni began his wireless career on Los Angeles rooftops, working beside his father in 1984. The setting suits the business he eventually built. Connectivity has always needed someone willing to deal with the building beneath the equipment. A signal may travel through the air; somebody still has to arrange where it starts.

Today, Gianni is the founder, chairman and CEO of MD7. His company develops and manages the infrastructure behind connected services. The work includes finding sites, handling property agreements and coordinating projects. These are substantial responsibilities with a modest public profile. Nobody admires a network for the punctuality of its lease administration, although they might miss it if it disappeared.

Gianni has spent much of his working life paying attention to that territory. His story runs through family, fieldwork, a well-stocked address book and a company whose name contains a small piece of autobiography. It also runs through a recurring question: how do you keep the practical arrangements of a network from becoming the thing that holds it back?

Before the address book

His early jobs took him through RAM Mobile Data, Whalen & Company and Nextel, then to Rome with AirTouch International and consulting work with BellSouth. He later joined his father at Gianni & Associates. During his RAM years, a snowy mountaintop survey near Santa Fe required a lift on a snowmobile. Wireless fieldwork could provide its own transport policy.

Then came a family holiday in Kona in 2002, when he stepped away from work and considered what to do next. MD7 followed in January 2003. The distance between a rooftop job and starting a company had given him something useful: an understanding of the people doing the work, as well as the work itself.

One relationship began over a cheeseburger in La Jolla. Tom Monroe introduced Gianni to Tom Leddo, who would become a longtime colleague and principal at MD7. Leddo remembers Gianni wanting a different sort of company before it had customers. That detail is revealing. The founder was considering what working together should feel like while the commercial proposition was still taking shape.

Leddo, Mark Christenson and Michael Fraunces joined Gianni near the beginning. Their association gave MD7 an early leadership group with a history that could accumulate alongside the business. A company can buy equipment quickly. Shared judgment takes longer to acquire, and generally arrives without an instruction manual.

The fortune in an ordinary obligation

MD7 had a wonderfully unceremonious starting asset: Gianni’s monochrome BlackBerry. The useful part was the collection of industry contacts inside it. He called people and asked where wireless was heading. Those conversations pointed toward operating expenses and the cost of renting cell sites as subscriber growth matured.

The opportunity was easy to overlook because it came dressed as a bill. Rent repeats. A decision made while building a network can remain a financial obligation long after the construction team has left. Gianni’s contacts were describing a business problem that would survive the excitement of the next technology launch.

In 2004, the merger of AT&T Wireless and Cingular brought thousands of overlapping sites and a large lease renegotiation assignment. MD7 handled negotiations by telephone rather than travelling to meet every private landlord. The arrangement required a way to coordinate work across many agreements. Repetition became a discipline.

By its fifteenth anniversary in 2018, MD7 reported having served 26 operators in fourteen countries. Its work included lease agreements, site development and managing property portfolios. The original problem had proved portable. Different places brought different requirements, but operators still needed their locations and commitments managed carefully.

A name with a private joke

There is a neat explanation for the company’s name. Michael David Gianni gives you MDG. G is the seventh letter of the alphabet. Graphic artist Eric LeVine turned that into MD7. A name that sounds like a technical designation turns out to be rather personal, which is an efficient little joke for a business concerned with technical infrastructure.

The operating methods became more elaborate as the work grew. Spreadsheets were no longer adequate for managing projects. MD7 developed LiveTrack from its experience, giving teams a system for coordinating the steps and smaller tasks that sit inside infrastructure assignments. Good intentions benefit from somewhere to record the next deadline.

The later development of AI tools followed a similarly practical line. In March 2025, chief technology officer Scott Belie described document processing that identifies contract elements for expert review, along with LiveTrack systems that track milestones and flag potential bottlenecks. The company describes these capabilities as assistance for its staff.

That distinction keeps the discussion close to the work. A lease contains language that has consequences. A project involves people waiting for other people to finish. The useful test for software in this setting is whether it helps somebody make the next sound decision or complete the next task. The novelty wears off; the obligations remain.

The people on the other end

Gianni’s public account of leadership returns to conduct: integrity, respect, optimism. His compact maxim is “Attitude is everything.” Such phrases can become office wallpaper. The more interesting question is what a company asks people to do with them when a deadline approaches or a colleague needs help.

“Attitude is everything.”

Michael Gianni

MD7’s stated values include a balanced life, giving back, continuous improvement and respect for the individual. In June 2022, Gianni described team huddles, diversity lunches and an open-door policy as ways of keeping colleagues connected. His language placed internal relationships alongside the company’s external expansion.

There are concrete career histories behind that vocabulary. In 2022, MD7 promoted Catherine Abejar, Chris Rios and Courtney Davis to vice president roles. Each had spent at least nine years with the company. Abejar had started as a lease negotiator in 2006. Gianni presented the promotions as evidence that employees could build a career there.

The longevity matters because the company’s service depends on accumulated knowledge. Someone who understands how an agreement was reached may be useful when it needs revisiting. Someone who has handled a difficult approval can help a newer colleague anticipate the next one. Keeping experience inside the company has an operational value as well as a human one.

His own professional life continues to involve those longstanding colleagues. Christenson serves as president and Leddo as chief strategy officer. The company Gianni now leads is larger and broader than the one discussed over lunch, but parts of its working memory still belong to people who were present near the start.

In 2022, Gianni was named an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year Central Plains finalist. The recognition attached his own name to a business whose contribution is usually measured through customers’ networks. It also supplied a more public milestone in a career that has largely concerned the work behind somebody else’s service.

A different kind of mobile

MD7 moved its corporate headquarters from San Diego to Allen, Texas, in 2021. Gianni said the team had considered numerous cities and wanted an environment that could support further growth. International operations are based in Dublin. It is a geographical arrangement that makes relationships across distance part of the daily work.

By 2022, Gianni was describing a broader interpretation of mobility. MD7 had entered EV charging in North America and Europe and was also helping deploy satellite earth stations. Charging brought a recognizable set of tasks: finding locations, arranging property rights and coordinating construction. A different piece of equipment could still need familiar expertise.

In Allen, the connection became tangible through work with XCharge North America. In 2023, the companies announced plans for public fast charging at MD7’s headquarters. The office car park offered a particularly direct setting for the company’s expansion. A business accustomed to helping networks find a home could look downstairs for an example.

Gianni’s explanation for entering charging was grounded in the resemblance to early cellular deployment. Operators needed help establishing many sites. That observation gives the expansion a coherent rationale without making its outcome inevitable. Experience travels best when someone can explain precisely which task remains familiar.

What certainty costs

In May 2025, MD7 reported more than $2 billion in cumulative operating expenditure savings secured for telecom clients. The figure describes savings for customers, accumulated through the company’s work. It gives a financial dimension to years of attending to recurring costs, while leaving room for the less glamorous detail of how each agreement was handled.

February 2026 brought a different financial event: a closed $100 million strategic equity partnership with funds managed by Tikehau Star Infra. Its stated purpose is to support acquisitions of strategically positioned mobile infrastructure assets for wireless operator partners in North America. Gianni’s emphasis was on greater certainty for operators as ownership becomes more complicated.

That development extends his concern with the ground beneath a network. Advising on an agreement and arranging capital around infrastructure assets are different responsibilities. Both depend on understanding what an operator needs to keep a service running over time. The new partnership places more weight on ownership stability and planning.

There is a pleasing continuity in the trajectory. Gianni began helping put wireless equipment on buildings. He went on to build a business around the agreements that let it stay there. The current ambition asks how those arrangements might become more predictable. Even after four decades of changing technology, there is still useful work to do at ground level.