Money From Thin Air: The Story of Craig McCaw - O. Casey Corr

[Saluki]

In doing a new video I mentioned this book, which not many people have read but it's very good.  McCaw's dad was an early cable pioneer who built a regional cable company with a mountain of debt and lost it all except for a single franchise in a small community in Washington State. It's why I always hated investing in cable companies. Even the best like John Mallone and John Hendricks have almost gone bankrupt many times.  We lionized the survivors, but forget about the others that got wiped out. McCaw inherited that, grew the company and made a lot in the hey day of cable and then got into Telecom, invested in Nextel, and did very well for himself.  He's not a household name, but it's an interesting part of the history of the industry.  Well worth checking out. 

 

I especially liked it because a client (who recently died, with a net worth of almost $4 billion) is mentioned in there in an accurate but unflattering way.  Some partners at my old law firm made millions when they invested along side him in a cell company which became the second biggest in the US (Metro Mobile) and was sold to one of the baby bells.  It's a reminder to me that you only need one really good idea to get rich.  

[whatstheofficerproblem]

Looking forward to the video, do post a link on here once done. I have worked for a Venture Capital firm before, it is fascinating how many unique businesses are out there with revolutionary ideas that fail because of timing or miserable execution, and then there are also outright stupid ideas and business models that are slapped with billions in valuation. Lucid motors with a market cap of $15B has a cash burn >$6B; Curious to know what his next billion dollar idea was.

[Saluki]

Craig McCaw is involved now with a company called Clearwire.  

 

The founders of Nextel are now involved with a company called Anterix which owns 900mhz broadband and licenses it to utility companies for private LTE networks. 

 

My client, took control of Citizens Utilities (water, gas, electric) and sold off all the utilities and bought rural ILECs and renamed it Citizens Telecommunications.  Because of the Universal Service Fee that you are (still) paying on your cellular service, it's almost impossible to lose money on rural fixed line phone service.  He made a bunch of money on that and bought a gas/pipeline company (Southern Union) when the energy industry was in the dumpster.  He later sold that for a bunch of money when energy was on an upswing.  I think the last thing that he bought while I was still at the law firm, which he still owned at his death was a lot of Spanish Language radio stations in the US (Mega Radio).  Which is part of the reason why I like Grupo Televisa so much (they own half of Univision, which includes a lot of Spanish language TV and Radio stations in the US).