President-elect Donald Trump has added a fourth member to the FCC landing team, the volunteers working on transitioning the agency to Republican majority control come Jan. 20.
David Morken is the newest member, currently the co-founder and CEO of Republica Wireless parent company, Bandwidth.com.
Morken combines a couple of life experiences that appear to hold a lot of weight with the incoming President. He is a former member of the U.S. military (a Marine) and an entrepreneur/disruptor who built an "overnight success" through a decade of hard work growing a business.
Bandwidth.com, which started as a URL generating sales leads for other telecoms, built out its network on the theory that WiFi could be the primary network and cellular (Sprint) the backup, which would allow it to charge less ($19 a month at launch) for voice and broadband.
Last month, Roslyn Layton, a visiting fellow at AEI, joined Jeff Eisenach and Mark Jamison on the team providing input on new FCC leadership.
While those members are think tank vets in the conservative Republican mode, Morken clearly has a populist streak, or at least a consumer-empowering marketing approach. “The cellular emperor has no clothes – smart consumers have been clamoring for someone to unlock the value of our home and office networks for years," he said when launching the hybrid WiFi/cellular approach in 2011.
While Morken is a triathlete who clearly pushes himself off the job, his on-the-job management approach is that execs should not push themselves at the expense of work/life balance.
