- After 10 years of “learning the ropes” at MCI in seven different jobs, I was promoted to be the General Manager of MCI's Personal Communications Services
- MCI was the #2 national long distance telephone operator at the time with $15B a year in revenue
- PCS would allow MCI to 1) improve profitability in its core business by lowering the costs imposed by the local telephone companies to originate and terminate long distance calls and 2) to expand into complementary mobile and Internet services
- Our team successfully lobbied the FCC to allow for a nationwide combinatorial bid for PCS licenses at auction (which required beating the sum of the bids by the local bidders)
- In 1993, I made a presentation to the Senior Executives of MCI, stating:
1) PCS will be a complete service platform offering new light-weight handsets capable of providing mobile, in-home, local, long distance, voice mail, email, messaging, video and information services
2) I recommended that MCI allocate $2 billion for license acquisition. We had organized a consortium of companies to participate with us at auction to fill in the holes in nationwide coverage
- MCI choose not participate in the auction
- The FCC auctioned two bands of spectrum covering all 50 states for about $3.8B each. MCI had missed out on PCS and a few years later declared bankruptcy after being purchased by a much smaller company
- T-Mobile choose to fill the roll that I carved out for MCI and today has an enterprise value of $320 billion
- In the face of company-inflicted failure, I left MCI to form GO Communications raising $126 million in equity and $750 million in debt to pursue PCS
Lesson: Be Bold in Rebounding from Failure (and don't second-guess yourself)!