Thought Leadership

Almost everything I have built started with something others overlooked: a market considered too small, a network thought too far gone, a country people were leaving rather than investing in. I took those on partly because the queue was shorter, and partly because people remember who showed up when others did not.

In the early years, we took deals that barely paid just to prove we would do what we said we would do. That was not generosity.

Trust is the one thing in this industry you cannot buy at any price. You build it one delivery at a time. Much of what the group does today rests on relationships earned that way.

I do not wait for proof. By the time something is proven, the opportunity usually belongs to somebody else. Text messaging made sense to me before the market agreed. Walking away from a profitable television business to pursue it looked risky at the time. To me, it was the logical next move.

I get restless the moment a business stops teaching me something new. That restlessness is one reason the group kept expanding into new industries instead of remaining a single telecom company. It is not simply a strategy. It is part of my temperament.

If I could hand one thing to someone starting out, it would be this: build where you are from. Hire people who understand the place. Stay through the part where it gets hard, because that is usually where anything worth keeping gets made.