Texas Wireless Summit 2009

[This is an acceptance "speech" that I did NOT make when I accepted the "2009 Wireless Industry Leadership Award" last night at the Texas Wireless Summit held in Austin.  They could have just hit me on the head with it and I couldn't have been much more stunned.  I regret to say that I sent this acceptance note via email the morning after. Worse yet, I forgot to include my co-founder and CTO Arun Chatterjee.  I'm sorry, Arun.  Thanks for taking my initial call just before you went down the ski slopes, thanks for signing up to take the ride, thanks for watching me make mistakes as a first-tine CEO, and thanks for building the vision and putting into reality the engineering behind the words.

I’m reminded of the recent discovery that Austin is NOT the live music capital of the world.  We’re not even #2.  We’re number #3, according to one authoritative source.  But when the news media tried to stir up controversy by checking in with local club owners, they were surprised to find that the majority of local music movers and shakers were pretty satisfied with being #3, behind New Orleans and New York, but ahead of Nashville, Chicago, Vegas, and all the rest.  And to be honest, I think many in the music industry were surprised that Austin even ranked that high.  The hubris of claiming to be the best at something comes with a price, yet passing up an opportunity to strive for something worthwhile is a shortcoming.  I’ve always thought of our unofficial music motto as more of a vision statement than a statement of fact and I’m proud of our community for striving towards that goal and even more proud that others are beginning to share our vision for how we see ourselves someday.

The Austin Wireless City Project began as a vision for where I saw we could be and in many ways we’ve gotten there.  But in many other ways, we have fallen short.  I guess that’s the hallmark of a good vision–you don’t want it to be fully realizable–complete accomplishment needs to be just beyond the reach.  The media and public love rankings.  It’s a great way to have a horse race with winners and losers all neatly ordered from top to bottom.  In almost every industry, the participants being ranked are rankled by the inherent and often insidious problems with the methodology and bias that eventually sorts everyone out.  It wasn’t long before the WiFi world had its first ranking.  The research was funded by Intel.  The opportunity I saw, was to measure something that I perceived was considered irrelevant by the bean counters–the degree of free-ness.  I didn’t want to see a world of “pervasive,” for-pay mobile access.  I knew that the phone companies would do their part to bring that into reality without my help.  I was convinced that WiFi didn’t need to go that way as well.  So, in a fit of hubris, I did my own research and ranking and declared Austin as the “free-est” wireless city in the world.  I confess that I coined the awkward word “free-est” so that it would be easy to track the meme through Google.  I sent out a press release and at that moment, we actually became the free-est wireless city in the world.

The Austin Wireless City Project has the mission to improve the quality and availability of public free WiFi in Austin, but a mission without do-ers is just a vision statement.  In the beginning, we had and needed lots of volunteers to build hotspot servers, talk to community businesses, install and maintain equipment, and support the hordes of early-adopter end-users.  We were fortunate as an organization to have been born out of a high-quality gene pool consisting of the DNA from EFF-Austin (Jon Lebkowsky, Ed Cavazos, Gene Crick), Austin Free-Net (Ana Sisnet, Sue Beckwith, Charlie Scott), the City of Austin (Pete Collins), the Austin start-up community (Chris Boyd, Eric Stumberg, Erin Defosse, Bart Bohn), the Austin wireless industry (Liz Maxfield, Dave Roon, Jim Keeler), and UT (Sandy Stone, Gary Chapman, Leslie Jarmon).  Our heart was in the right place and our profit motive was couched in community service and economic development.  At times, it felt more like activism than a service organization and increasingly, I became involved with an amazing group of international colleagues fighting for digital access, inclusion, and literacy.  My relationship to this fight and with its participants on both sides, will likely prove to be one of the greatest challenges of my career.

You see, while having a vision of free access is as cheap as the words to say it, it’s actually quite costly to accomplish.  The technology required to support Austin Wireless in its mission had to be created.  A new start up was born, Less Networks, of which I’m the founder and CEO.  At first, we were more of a garage band working for tips, than we were a company.  We’ve been accused, god forbid, of being socialists. We’ve been accused of ruining the fledgling for-pay WiFi industry in Austin.  And we’ve been accused of complicating free WiFi by requiring everyone to create an account and log-in.  In our first year of business, we earned nothing, we spent our own money and we put in a lot time.  In 2004, our second year, we spent more money and earned a whopping $134.87.  Anyone who said that we were a garage band working for tips was clearly over-estimating our ability to earn money!  Even socialists are better funded.  The real cost was borne personally by each team member who gave up the opportunity and compensation to work someplace else. To work at Less Networks, you more or less have to drink the Kool-Ade and you have to pay for it out of your own pocket because we can’t afford to give it to you.  Larry Ketcham and Lennie Myers worked for at least a couple years each, without in dime in payment or even an agreement or promise of compensation for their efforts.  As a first-time CEO, I recognized that that kind of loyalty and dedication cannot be bought in a dot-commish industry characterized by stock options, quick cash-outs, and seemingly lavish spending.  I’m proud to say they have both been offered and accepted partnerships in our impoverished WiFi enterprise.  There is something else that I”m proud of.  Even though, we couldn’t afford to pay our partners, from the beginning, we figured out a way to provide health insurance.  And it is my understanding, that Humana took our case to the very top before they made the first exception in their corporate history to allow a company without a payroll to extend healthcare benefits to its sweat equity employees.  I didn’t realize at the time exactly what I was asking Humana to consider.  I knew it was important to my team, but apparently, it’s become quite a hot topic for lots of folks.

In a community of leaders like Austin, it feels a bit strange to be presented with a leadership award when we all know that we’re more or less sitting on a Lazy Susan of Leadership.  Quite frankly, the decision to lead, more often than not, seems like a bunch of leaders sitting in a room saying, “Uh, not me.  I did it last time.  What about you?”  So at least in Austin, the obligation and privilege to lead is a shared responsibility among equally capable leaders.  I’m grateful for being given the opportunity to step up and to enjoy the support and friendship of so many leaders equally deserving of this award.  So anyway, I should have had the presence of mind to say at least some of this stuff last night when others could have heard your names and heard how you all played an important role in the story.  On behalf of all of you on this list, one day too late, I accept the award with your thanks.  I know this was a long note, but as my friend Douglas Plummer said, “A thank you can never be too long.”

–r