Interview: Craig McCaw
Pioneer of Telecommunications

In school, was there a teacher who influenced you?

Craig McCaw: Where I went to school, there was a very personal relationship with the professors. There were a number who challenged me very personally. Ultimately, what really drives you is the competitive relationship to someone pushing you, and you respond.

I had a particular English teacher who was wont to challenge me in the learning of Macbeth. And as a result of that, I think I memorized more passages of Macbeth than anyone would ever want to know. But to this day, those beat heavily in my mind as I think about processes and about Macbeth's whole sort of philosophical relationship to opportunity and the good and evil that he failed to comprehend, and as it were control his most base instincts. And that ultimately destroyed him. And I must say that whole process with that professor was very powerful to me.

Was there a book that moved you as a child?

Craig McCaw: Another one would be Oliver Twist. There, but for fate, go I. Oliver Twist lived in the boarding house for orphaned kids and was treated very badly, and yet he turned out to be the child of a very wealthy person. Solely because of the context in which he lived, he was a treated extraordinarily badly. I remember that, and the recognition that there really is very little difference between people.

I think Dickens' whole approach to that question, the whole moral question of whether we are or are not different because of our upbringing and our social status, I think has put me in a stead to where I think I'm more comfortable with an egalitarian world, such as we're seeing evolve from the Internet where everyone really is nameless, faceless, you don't know where they are, you don't know what they mean. And in a sense, you can't put them in a box, because you don't know what box they would belong in. So, I think Dickens to me had a very sad message about human behavior, but also a very optimistic one. That if you recognize that, if we get beyond that, that there's a wonderful life beyond for all.

How old were you when you read that?

Craig McCaw: I think I read Oliver Twist when I was 14.

Did you have a philosophical bent already?

Craig McCaw: I grew up in Seattle, and I have to say the West, being younger in its settlement, was less stratified socially. I think we grew up in a relatively more open and -- if you use the term egalitarian -- society. It wasn't really egalitarian, but much more so than if you grew up in the oldest city in the East. So naturally you see, in people from the West, a little more open thinking. I think that happens solely because the communities have had less time to gel, and for people to achieve a pecking order. I think that explains how that would happen. But also, I think I had trouble fitting as a dyslexic. I don't think like other people, so I don't fit very well in a clique. As a result of that I have trouble quantifying people as directly as others. I look at their ideas, rather than at them so much as individuals.

As a child, were your parents supportive and encouraging people?

Craig McCaw: My parents believed that you are individually accountable for your actions, and did a wonderful job of challenging us, giving us freedom. I have three brothers, and I think all of us benefited from an extraordinarily open relationship. That is to say that we had the right to do nearly anything we wanted to do, and to be accountable for the actions and, as it were, decide for ourselves what the proper balance between doing good and evil was, based upon the consequences. I think that's very appropriate for governing human beings in general. The fewer rules you put on people, the better they will behave ultimately. The more they sense that their fate is in their own hands and their own choice, the more they will respond in the way you want them to do.

So you became aware of autonomy at a pretty early age.

Craig McCaw: Autonomy is really a central part of my life. I believe that it drives the kind of behavior in individuals that we want. And it really made a major impact on my life and how I respond to others. And my belief is that if you pass autonomy as far down in any grouping of people as you can, you will get extraordinary results if you ask for a lot. The greatest burden you can put on someone is trust.

You started your business at your own personal financial risk, is that correct?

Craig McCaw: In starting my business, there was no one event. We really went from one step to another, to another, and gathered people. Debt for us was merely a tool that we used. The fundamental thing we had was people. Finding people who were very talented, it's not necessarily easy to get them to work together. It's very easy to find someone who will salute and follow your every order, but it's very difficult to take people who sit down when you walk in the room -- as a matter of irreverence -- and get them to respond.

Borrowing money was a tool for us because of the businesses we were in --cable television, cellular telephone, paging -- all were very capital intensive. In a perfect world, you don't have that. It's easier if you don't have it, but it's the leverage to make a lot happen, either pro or con. As long as you believe in the pro, and you've thought out how not to run out of money if things don't go as you expect, then indebtedness, as it were, ups the ante and makes everybody work harder, because you know the consequences of failing to deliver on your promises.

Was there a level of fear involved the first time you realized you had to spend to gain?

Craig McCaw: We never exactly had fear at the beginning of borrowing money. It usually came along the way. When you borrow tremendous amounts of money, there are always times of adversity, external factors, a change in the economy, or a liquidity crisis, driven by the government.

Those are the times when you really have to become good because you're scared to death and you know what can happen. It's like walking on a tightrope. In the good times you can only fall six inches, in the bad times you can fall 100 feet. So you know that, at those times, you can't fail.

How does that feel, to have to walk through your fear?

Craig McCaw: If you're very committed to something, you're not afraid, because you're willing to pay the price. You just have to decide the price you're willing to pay to get something done.

If I want the wall to fall down and I'm willing to pay the price and push on it long enough, it will fall down. By some circumstance, I can get that wall to fall down. The question is, was it worth it in the total context of my own personal morality, right and wrong, the amount of effort it took, and as it were, the value of that contribution? Was it significant enough for all the effort?

Courage is merely a matter of being committed and being prepared to pay the price, whatever it is, for what you want to have happen. And when you're really committed and when you love what you do, you will pay that price. I always want to say that for my company, I would probably stand in front of a truck and start shooting at it to stop it because I wanted to defend the company. I viewed it as my responsibility to the people and the mission and the goals. And if my personal price was too high, I was prepared to pay it nevertheless, on behalf of the whole concept about what I was about.

When you started the business, what was your vision and mission?

Craig McCaw: I began my career in cable television at 16, selling door to door, climbing poles and helping to construct a system in a small town in Washington. I'm not sure I had a vision of what I was going to do at all.

I was profoundly affected by the experience, because it was a very blue collar, relatively poor community, and I learned the relationship of the technology to the people, and their attitude toward it. Maybe my whole attitude toward life comes from being forced, as a relatively shy person, to confront people and ask them to do something, and try to explain why it might be in their interest.

If you give something to people in their interest, they will eventually realize it. If they don't know it on day one, it really isn't important. It's your job to think almost anthropologically about humanity and say, "What would be in their best interest?" And then try to get there first, and know that eventually they'll learn that what you have is worth their while. If I ever got a vision in business it was that, the Field of Dreams mentality, and that's how I've really operated in my career. I've never worried whether somebody else thought it was the right thing. If I believed it was the right thing, then I was prepared to build it and hoped that "they would come," based upon if I were that person and I were in their circumstances, that I would appreciate what product was being created and it was worthwhile.

What preparation did you have for going in this direction?

Craig McCaw: It almost doesn't matter what direction you're going in. You learn and you see an opportunity, a gap between what is and what should be. If one thinks in anthropological terms, if you go towards what should be, then eventually things will get there and you just have to work out the timing.

With cellular telephony, in particular, we saw an enormous gap between what was and what should be. The idea that people went to a small cubicle, a six-by-ten office, and sat there all day at the end of a six-foot cord, was anathema to me. I mean, it makes absolutely no sense. It is machines dominating human beings. If one thing is obvious, people will pay, people will contribute something for control of their lives, the right to choose. And I think if anything we saw in cellular telephone it was that people were being subjugated needlessly to 1890's technology.

No need existed for that to continue. Over the long term, for another 20 years, we'll see people detach themselves from being confined in small places, only to communicate far distances. I believe that people go to the office today to socialize with others in the building, not to have the benefits of a PBX with a telephone. It's not efficient with the technology we have today. It doesn't make any sense and it's a lousy way to use people, to commute in traffic in the morning just to sit in an office and talk to anyone, except to others who are far away.

Did you realize going in that telecommuting would help women?

Craig McCaw: Along the way I think we recognized full well that the situation of women is the most pure example, and also the place where society has the most to gain and lose. Their relationship to their children is vital. The children must not be abandoned, but to lose the intellectual contribution of women is significant to a society.

If there was any hope we had for the technology in that area, it was that people could use it to make a contribution, but they would also take the efficiency of time and use it to spend with their children. Knowing my own experience as a child, you cannot raise children by remote control. Children cannot grow up properly without the personal relationship to an adult.

Was your mother a role model for you?

Craig McCaw: My mother was an interesting role model for us, in that she was so financially oriented, as a result of having been the first woman graduate in accounting from the University of Washington, which is one of the largest universities in America. She gave us a lot of benefit of that precise thinking that came from accounting.

My father, on the other hand, was an extremely creative, almost wild-eyed visionary, and we saw the balance of the two. If anything came of that, it was that my mother added the anchor, the balance to my father's creativity. I learned fairly young that if you didn't do the precision part, the creative part would evaporate. You had to have the foundation under the creativity. She continues to provide that kind of foundation for me today.

How can you be an incredibly successful businessman and keep this equally strong humanitarian side?

Craig McCaw: I think there's clearly a conflict at times between the humanistic side of a person and their success in a business career. But their ability to balance those is their very definition. It is not a question of how much you can achieve in life if you do it in an immoral manner. Ultimately, you will pay a price greater than you ever would dream it might cost you. And so, my belief has been that if I have a definition it is: "How much can we accomplish as a team, a group of people, without hurting others?"

What is the minimum consequence to others we can have? In so many businesses, particularly those where ideas dominate and they relate not to manufacturing a commodity, but focusing on extraordinary value to others, it's not necessary to hurt someone else in order to get somewhere.

"I've always said, "I don't want to throw someone else in the ditch, so that I can go by." I see very little need, particularly in the new world order, where ideas are totally dominating over mechanical aspects, that it's absolutely unnecessary to make those moral sacrifices in order to be successful.

Talk about your idea for the global network.

Craig McCaw: Teledesic is an interesting business model, in that it reflects what almost always happens, which is that when you start, the very idea of what you were going to do evolves as technology changes and as you realize the changes in the marketplace.

Initially, Teledesic was to be pay phones, as it were, for the rural areas of the world. Later we realized that wasn't going to work. Wireless, the cellular child that we had been working on for so long, was going to chew up that marketplace before we ever got there, and we'd have very little purpose. We had to do more than that for these rural communities.

Our dream in Teledesic is that we can change a paradigm, which is, "You have to go to the city in order to have opportunity." Environmentally, socially and every other way I can think of, tearing people from their communities as a choice between prosperity or being poor is unacceptable. If we think of the consequences of building roads, and sewers and everything else, when people already have a home, it's illogical. We thought, "If a billion people move to the city in China, the environmental damage will be extraordinary."

Moreover, we recognize that people have television in virtually every village of the world. They see the benefits of an industrialized society, the benefits of money. If we deny them that, we can be sure that they will move to the city, perhaps your city. They can drive from Guatemala to New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Baltimore, wherever, looking for that opportunity. We can't keep them out ultimately, if the disparity is too large. So we must provide the tools.

If you provide full-scale communications and computing architecture to the places where people live, they actually are very efficient. They don't have to drive an hour to work. They don't have to do all the silly things that we do in the city. If you can take the middlemen out of products -- whether they be carpets, or coffee, or something else -- if somebody can sell their rice crop in Vietnam directly to the restaurant in Paris, you have accomplished something, because you've given them enough margin for wealth.

Now, the question is, "Can we prevent those people from repeating the mistakes of an industrialized society, or will they bring it to the rural area?" We dearly hope we can figure out a way to prevent that from happening. As it were, to pave the rice paddy now that they're rich. We recognize the tool is there, now we have to use it for good, and find a way to make sure that's what happens.

What are your thoughts about the Internet?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Are there times when you feel your integrity is truly challenged?

Craig McCaw: Your integrity is always challenged in business. I have long believed you have to assess your options in a very military way. You have to decide what the possibilities are, and then you have to decide whether you're going to use them. The people around you will bring you options which are amoral, or questionable, or aggressive. For the benefit of the people around you, you have to know what the alternatives are, what the other person might do to you, and how to respond to it.

You have to know what evil to put on the other person, as it were, to prevent them from doing it. You have to have your guard up. You have to think almost as a chess player. If they do that, what will I do? What could they do to me, and how do I defend against it?

So you're constantly coming to grips with the morality of it, because you are looking at all the evil you could do and then deciding what you will do. Mostly, when you make it clear that you've got something bad you can do to other people; they behave, because they recognize that you are not namby-pamby. You're not akin to Jimmy Carter trying to deal with Iran, where our American sensibilities were incompatible with their sensibilities, and they view you as weak if you haven't thought out the consequences. You have to demonstrate strength in order to be good.

What advice would you give a kid who had the motivation to pursue telecommunications, but not a clue as to how to go about it?

Craig McCaw: I'm not sure I would advise someone to actually take a career, in particular. I think they need to be driven from within and they'll know when they see it that it's the right thing to do.

I believe people are driven by some adversity to want to do greater things. If life is too easy, you take the easy part of it. You have to be driven by competitiveness, which is usually driven by adversity. You've been put down as a child; there was something you had to overcome. In almost every person you see who's really interesting; they have had the gift of adversity. Something bad happened to them which caused them to want to do more.

Once they got good at overcoming it, it's kind of like getting a ball rolling down hill. Pretty soon it's real easy and you just keep on doing it.

The power of ideas is the most important element to me today. Ideas, carefully nurtured, whatever they are, are what's of value today. We see that the world does not value mechanical things as much as the product of ideas. And that's creative thought, whatever it is. Software, meaning singing, dancing, playing baseball, basketball, doing something which is the human contribution.

Machines do mechanical things better than we can ever hope to and nobody cares. It's really the things that improve life and make something better that are important. Once someone finds something like that, that happens to attract them, the rewards will come.

I'm very dyslexic, so that forced me to be quite conceptual, because I'm not very good at details. And because I'm not good at details, I tend to be rather spatial in my thinking, oriented to things in general terms, rather than the specific. That allows you to step back and say, "What's the easy way? How do I get through this easily?" It also makes you very intuitive. You tend to look at things, and you don't want to read so much; reading is harder for a dyslexic. So you become very quick, very intuitive in understanding what the point is. And that's good with ideas. And so, I feel blessed about that.

I think that people should be guided by their hearts, not by their minds. I If you're guided too much by your mind, you're not in touch with what you're really good at. Sometimes, in the world, we find an idiot savant, who is great at some one thing. I just have to focus on what I'm good at and not worry if other people don't like it that I'm not good at something they treasure, like details.

How do you achieve your own balance?

Craig McCaw: For me, balance is time; time doing something other than directly working on projects. That is not to say I won't take the opportunity to think about something. But your best ideas always come when you're not focused on work at that exact instant.

I believe in using the time I win with technology for things that I want to do. I love to fly airplanes and that's a great pursuit. If I have to go somewhere, I might as well fly myself, or participate in that process. I love mechanical things in general, boats or the like. Above all, I believe you should take solace in yourself and time on your own, time doing the things you choose to do, because you've figured out how to do it using technology.

If you use technology simply to put in more hours, then you're cheating yourself and I think you're cheating your contribution. As you're getting started you have to do that, and you work as long as you can, as hard as you can. But over time, if that's the balance, then the price was too high. If you didn't get the time for family and friends and the things you love to do, then you shouldn't have made that trade-off. Then it would have been a lot more fun to live in abject poverty in Guatemala or in Kazakhstan, rather than participate in the material world, which is shallow.

There is no happiness from material things. They can help you do things, or make more of your time, but they don't have substance. That's one thing I'm sure of.

Is there an American Dream today?

Craig McCaw: To me, the meaning of the American Dream is what happens if you give people freedom and accountability. Anything is possible if you allow people the rope with which to do things, either hang themselves, or climb higher.

If we as a country have a fault, it is that we are too free. If we have a benefit, it is that we are too free. It's a difficult balance. The line between chaos and greatness is very fine. The story of Lord of the Flies applies here. We are capable of extraordinary evil, if there are no limits whatsoever.

The American Dream is all about what people will do if you allow them the open opportunity. And that's why an extraordinary number of people come from other countries and achieve greatness here. It's because they have the desire, the toughness, the willingness to work, and the education, and then they do something with it, and it is extraordinary to see. Other countries are beginning to determine the fact that they can't succeed against us if they don't provide more freedom. And that's why we see a growing global revolution in decontrolling telecommunications. Because without that, their societies can't compete with ours. Because ideas, and the nurturing of those ideas is what is making America great.

Do you think kids today see the promise the world of telecommunications holds for them, and their own futures?

Craig McCaw: I think kids recognize intuitively the power of the computer, and what the free flow of information can mean. But our society guides us to think that we have to find our place in the world very quickly, and I always sense a certain amount of desperation to find that place. My only guidance is you'll find it in your heart.

You don't think people need to have one particular skill to get into that world?

Craig McCaw: Opportunity today isn't related to how well you do something mechanical. It's ideas, and nurturing those ideas, that builds value. Technology has opened us to valuing those things above all else. That can be artistic, it can be anything. The free flow of information makes possible opportunities we never dreamed of. Those who recognize that, and who are open to it, will join this great rush of opportunity in building a whole new world around the free flow of information. The idea of browsers for the Internet, to make it easy to find information, has been critical to the process. Of course, an extraordinary opportunity came to Netscape, for being the first one to do it well. When you see that gap between what is and what should be, that's an opportunity. "Why is there that gap? It doesn't seem right." And then the question is, "How do we close the gap?" Then, figure out if it's worth the cost of doing it today. It may be doable in two years. In two years you may be doing other things, but if you're open to it, you'll come back to it, when there's a possibility.

Is there a course of study you could recommend to students who are interested in your field?

Craig McCaw: I have a degree in history. I never thought it was important to study a particular business. I think you have to study life and understand that to be open to opportunity. So I have no particular recommendation, except that you understand the past, because if you understand the past, you understand the future. Change occurs because there is a gap between what is and what should be. The change can be catastrophic, or the opportunities can be extraordinary, because you've seen a gap.

I think people who understand both science and philosophy, anthropology, whatever, really are going to be benefited the most. And I've always been rather negative about studying the specific aspects of business in school. I always have felt that business schools, which are too disciplined, create wonderful bureaucrats. And bureaucrats are important, but if you really want to make a contribution I think you need to be open to the possibilities.

Artistically speaking, in understanding life, you understand business.

Thank you very much. It's been fascinating.