As one of the first employees at a small cellular phone start-up called Nextel, I gained firsthand experience in how a business grows from an idea to a company that, at its peak, employed many thousands.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Many small businesses are running entire businesses from a mobile phone.
I sensed my chance and embraced the telecom business. I started marketing telephones, answering/fax machines under the brand name Beetel, and the company picked up really fast.
I've tended to work at fast-growing companies that improve the way business gets done.
For commercial customers, we have invested in specialist mobile-first sales capabilities, and we are building out our device-selling channel.
It was really a very small company when I started and it changed very rapidly during those first periods.
Jeremy Stoppelman started Yelp. Max Levchin started Slide. I started LinkedIn. It was a mininova explosion of folks jumping out to doing other entrepreneurial activities.
The greatest job creation is driven by entrepreneurs and young businesses, so they merit special attention.
In the space of three weeks, I met a fair bunch of the guys who were just starting those little programmers' co-ops, and everybody was talking about starting businesses.
It's worth noting that everything - from the Internet to electric cars, genomic sequencing, mobile apps, and social media - were pioneered by startups, not existing companies.
When I came into the mobile phone business, I was really the upstart who pretty much took the business, not quite by storm, but really made an impact on it quite early on. But it was from a position, really, of feeling that I was a last mover.