Closing the Deal

These guys are money - $5 billion at least, probably $10 billion. They've turned this Thursday into their own casual Friday because they're going to be stuck all day in a Miami industrial park, listening to a boy genius yap about how he's going to conquer the world. With their money,...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Inc. (Boston, Mass.) Mass.), 2004-03, Vol.26 (3), p.70
Main Author: McDougall, Chris
Format: Magazinearticle
Language:English
Subjects:
Case studies
Cellular telephones
Claure, Marcelo
Entrepreneurs
International trade
Investors
Venture capital
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:These guys are money - $5 billion at least, probably $10 billion. They've turned this Thursday into their own casual Friday because they're going to be stuck all day in a Miami industrial park, listening to a boy genius yap about how he's going to conquer the world. With their money, of course. Not all day, actually - there is a later flight back to New York, but these three venture capitalists are catching the first one out at 3 p.m. That's all the time they need, they figure, to hear everything worth hearing from Marcelo Claure, a Bolivian who was hustling cell phones out of a car trunk 10 years ago, and his Brightstar Corp., which frankly doesn't sound a whole lot different than his car-trunk operation, except by scale. The VC trio wouldn't have even bothered getting on the plane this morning if it weren't for two things: 1. Marcelo Claure raked in a billion dollars last year, and 2. they have no idea how. The Brightstar basics aren't hard to understand. Marcelo buys cell phones from Motorola and sells them to wireless carriers across Latin America. Couldn't be simpler. Except - how come no one else can do it, while Brightstar has seen near triple-digit growth every year?
ISSN:0162-8968