The Difference Maker

Bill deKay: Early radio exposure kindled lifelong wireless knack. Learned customer behavior through paging, SMR and cellular stints. Made entrpreneurial and VC stops. Now heading up Telespree, helping wireless carriers redefine the customer experience.

I got involved in wireless when I was 10 years old. My Dad was a telephone company engineer and installed radios for Motorola on the weekends, and I used to go around with him. That got me thinking about wireless at an early age.

My first job after business school was running an AT&T network operations center. Later I joined Sprint as a product manager. When the Bell System broke up, I took over Sprint's equal access program. Equal access also meant equal cost, so Sprint's long-distance division went from making a lot of money to being unprofitable. Long-distance became not as much fun.

I joined a regional paging carrier called Dial Page in the Carolinas. I later moved over to run the parent company's cellular division. We built another division called Dial Call that had 300,000 business-to-business customers. At that time, Nextel was building a cellular operation using the SMR frequencies. We met with Motorola to find out how we could apply iDEN technology to the enterprise customers we already had in paging. We built what is now the Nextel operation in the Southeast.

After that I built a company called Conxus Communications that was using Motorola two-way paging technology. We had 90,000 customers, but when Motorola backed out of the two-way paging business we had to shut it down. For the last couple years I've been involved in angel investing and venture consulting.

What attracted me to Telespree was a platform that's not dependent on any one segment of wireless. We have applications that automate the customer acquisition process and help carriers customize the experience for enterprise customers.

Telespree's founders developed a disposable phone, but to make the concept work they had to automate the activation experience, so they built a platform to do that. Carriers saw the platform as something that appealed to all aspects of their businesses. So Telespree repositioned itself.

Wireless has moved into the customer segmentation phase. Carriers tailor offerings and channels to various segments, whether it's the youth group or traveling executives. Given those trends, we think we really have something that's of strategic value to each carrier.

--As told to Jason Meyers