Craig McCaw Interview (page: 4 / 5) Pioneer of Telecommunications	Print Interview

What are your thoughts about the Internet?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Craig McCaw: My excitement about the Internet is manifold. For students, by the way, the opportunity is enormous. The Internet represents almost an governmentless society being created globally between people, without much restraint. It violates many of the philosophical principles by which people governed themselves in the first place. And it works because it's electronic. We aren't actually in each other's space. But essentially, a whole new society is being created by people without their government. Governments are trying to figure out how to be relevant, but they don't even know how, because it's pure. It's between people and they determine almost all of the parameters. A few issues around pornography, crime, or the like, clearly belong in the analysis, but they haven't been a part of the process so far. The Internet is classless. It's borderless and it's timeless, it's evolving through time and space. It's control of time and space, such that you don't need to move to another place to find out what's going on there. You can open up the library in Leningrad, in St. Petersburg, [Russia] today, without even going there, in a way that we wouldn't have conceived of just a few years ago. It's like a new gold rush. The number of extraordinarily successful companies and projects and ideas coming from it is breathtaking. What's very irritating to the known society that is business as we know it, is that the entrepreneurs of the Internet are 20, or 18. Because those individuals are pure, they're susceptible. The child in them is still strong, and the child is the creative part of this.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. The extraordinary achievements in the future on the Internet, in my opinion, will be driven, just as Netscape was, by people in their 20s. Perhaps the next great entrepreneurs will be teenagers. It's amazing to think that people will be wildly rich perhaps, or at least wildly creative beyond anyone's dreams, at very young ages. It's almost like returning to the Old West, when Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were very young and that age is not a barrier. Now we have to decide how rich you ought to be perhaps at 18, but I don't know that that's something that society needs to decide for us.

[ Key to Success ] The American Dream

It's clear that extraordinary ideas and value are going to be created by people at very young ages who are susceptible to this whole new world that evolves when you erase time and space this way on a global basis.

Is there a downside we have to look out for?

Craig McCaw: The Internet is a tool for good and evil. Communications as a whole are tools for good and evil. They are very strong, and we must be very careful of the negatives that can come from such a tool. But it's also clear that if you take the time that is given you and you spend it wisely, then you can have a good life.

The Protestant work ethic does not necessarily work in the environment of the free flow of information, where you can work and play anywhere. If I have one concern, it is that government and companies do not understand the relationship between contribution and time. We should be measured on what we do, not how long we spend to do it.

If major corporations don't understand this, they will be destroyed. We will see virtual corporations rise, and the voluntary cooperation of people who are not even in the same place most of the time. They must meet and get to know one another, but we need to take the time we save and spend it on people, on socialization.

So if you look at a city, a city becomes more social and cultural than for the pure economics. We don't have to push everybody into little, tiny spaces to work, we should put them there to be with other people and socialize.

Government, globally, needs to come to grips with this changed relationship. We don't know quite how to measure people for their contribution if we don't measure their hours, physically, in a place. But we have to do that, or this technology could be very dangerous.

What's the difference between the way you handle criticism publicly and internally?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Craig McCaw: I make a practice of trying never to read what people say about me. Because if you read what they say and you care, then they won. And I have great respect for the press, and a great belief in a free press. But it's necessary that you insulate yourself from what other people think. The greatest ideas you will ever have are the ones that other people don't understand. And if you're in that position, and you care too much what they think, you will not do the right thing. And therefore, I purposefully have long ago decided that if I live by the moral code that I want to live by, then what people think of me is not so important, because I'm doing what I believe is right and I'm not trying to hurt other people.

[ Key to Success ] Integrity

So long as my success, such as it is, does not come at the expense of other people, then I'm happy, and I don't mind if they don't agree with me. In fact, it's a lot of fun when they don't, because life is a long time, and the more they criticize you, the more they compliment you later if you're right. And sometimes, by the way, you're wrong, and you have to be prepared for that.

What would you say has been your contribution to society so far?

Craig McCaw: I'd like to think what I have contributed so far has been a certain amount of willingness to give trust to people. Whether they're the people I worked with or others, to teach people the value of respect for other human beings. If I have done that for the people I've worked with in some small way, if we as a company have done that in some small way, then we've been successful.

If we've given people some slightly greater control over their lives, then we've done something good. Whether they've worked with us, for us, or against us, I think we set a tone, that belief, that the more trust you give people, the more you're going to get from it, and that could be your customers, or the people you work with.

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