Craig McCaw

Business Speaker Craig McCaw is the son of a broadcasting magnate and started out selling cable services door-to-door for his father’s company. Turns out he had the ‘golden touch’ for telecom!

When his father died, Craig too the cable company and set out to rebuild his family name. He used cash flows from his growing cable company to buy other remote cable companies, resulting in a profitable conglomerate. By the 1980’s McCaw Cablevision was the 20^th largest cable carrier in the U.S. Craig co-founded McCaw Cellular with his brothers, and eventually sold it to AT&T in 1993 for $11.5 billion.

His next venture, was investing in satellite network called Nextel. By 1995, Craig McCaw gained control of the company contributing, along with his brothers, $1.1 billion over time. Within four years Nextel grew to become a challenging wireless company. In 1999 he formed Nextel Partners, Inc. which was later acquired by Sprint Nextel. In 1994, Craig and Bill Gates teamed to form Teledesic, for broadband satellite communications system with almost 300 low earth orbit satellites. In 2002, Teledesic stopped satellite productions and in 2003, it sold its spectrum licenses.

In August of 2004, Craig founded Clearwire Corporation—a provider of wireless broadband internet service. In 2008 it completed a transaction with Sprint combining their next-generation wireless broadband businesses into a new wireless communications company.

Business Speaker Craig McCaw is the founding donor of The Free Willy Foundation and serves on the boards of The Nature Conservancy, Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, Inc. and the Friends of Nelson Mandela Foundation. Craig is available for speaking engagements, hosting, and corporate appearances.

APPEARANCES: ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, CNN

TO WORK WITH CRAIG MCCAW: Business Speaker Craig McCaw can be hired for endorsements and events in roles such as public speaker, autograph signings, SMT’S, and public relation campaigns.