The Viniculturist

I started as a lineman with the Bell System way back when. I spent time in sales and other areas, and then I heard about wireless in the mid-1980s. Little could I have predicted then how pervasive it would become, but I did recognize it, at least, as a good opportunity.

I went to work for Airtouch, and it could not have been a better experience. It was a time when you could make a lot of money.

George Schmidt recruited me to Omnipoint, where I was COO. Omnipoint was in a race of a different kind, against time and money. The PCS world in its early days was highly competitive with several players. After Omnipoint, I was with LHS, a billing company with a very global reach.

Then I left the wireless industry for a while to run a company called Advanced Technology Group. ATG was a distressed CLEC that I was eventually able to sell to General Electric. I decided to try retirement for a little while, working my own small vineyard in Sonoma. I got blisters. Manual labor makes you strong, but otherwise it's overrated.

I have been through consolidation, and undoubtedly, there will continue to be consolidation. mBlox itself is essentially a merger of five smaller companies. Network operators bill their customers for premium message services, and we are in the middle of that as a service bureau.

As we get more into European and Asian markets, certainly we would consider doing this by merger or acquisition. In Japan, people sending 20 or 30 short messages a day is now commonplace. The U.S. market has huge potential, but it is still slower to develop.

Going from lineman to executive is something you see with less frequency these days. An MBA from Harvard doesn't hurt. The great thing about the Bell system was that it encouraged that and helped with the education. That's something you don't see as much anymore. Smaller companies are now the ones giving people an opportunity to advance. There are only 100 people at mBlox, but every one of them makes a difference.