Monday, October 20, 2003

Statement of President Shirley Ann Jackson at the William F. Glaser ‘53 Rensselaer Entrepreneur of the Year Award

Tonight we celebrate a spirit as old as Rensselaer and as new as the latest technology: the spirit of entrepreneurship. It is a spirit for which Rensselaer is justly known, and one of which we are justifiably proud.

Our history is rich with the accomplishments of those who have translated ideas into discoveries and innovations, which changed our world for the better.

Rensselaer’s founding mission — to prepare students for the application of science to the common purposes of life — has been made manifest time and again, as our alumni have applied their knowledge and ingenuity to bringing ideas to market, building businesses at the frontiers of scientific and technological discovery.

We expect no less from today’s students. We ask “Why not change the world?” because we believe that the power to do so lies within each of them.

So we empower them with the necessary tools — a fundamental understanding of both the physical and biological world; the ability to frame and to resolve open-ended questions; and a basic understanding of how organizations turn ideas, services, and technology into value. The process of invention, from concept to reality, is an integral part of the curriculum. In so doing, we are preparing the next generation of innovators and entrepreneurs to meet the challenges and to seize the opportunities of this century.

Today’s students will soon take their places at the frontiers of discovery and innovation, most of them in the fast-paced and ever-changing world of technology. How to translate scientific ideas and technological innovations into the world of commerce, to exploit these results for the benefit of society, can be said to be the essence of technological entrepreneurship. The current economy does present its challenges, however.

As a recent article in Venture Capital Journal put it, in the current economic climate “Times are tougher for entrepreneurs.” But, it continued, “the passion and innovative spirit that drives entrepreneurs to create is alive and well.”

We must all hope so. The world needs them. We need those with big ideas — important ideas, who can translate them into reality in the marketplace. In fact, the article in Venture Capital Journal noted, “If business plan competitions say something about the times we live in, today’s message is that two engineers with little more than a bright idea need not apply.”

Getting engineers past having little more than a bright idea is the essence of what Paul and Kathy Severino had in mind when they endowed the Severino Center for Technological Entrepreneurship in the Lally School of Management and Technology.

Confident that tomorrow’s entrepreneurs are at Rensselaer today, we take very seriously our commitment to entrepreneurship.

A highlight of the Severino Center’s extensive roster of programs is the presentation of the William F. Glaser ‘53 Rensselaer Entrepreneur of the Year award. With this award, we salute successful entrepreneurs who, in turn, are such important role models for our students. Those honored bring the world of scientific and technological entrepreneurship into Rensselaer classrooms and laboratories, sharing their experience and wisdom with graduate and undergraduate students, as tonight’s recipient will do tomorrow morning.

Given the importance of the entrepreneurial spirit in Rensselaer’s past, present, and future, it is indeed a singular honor we bestow in selecting the Entrepreneur of the Year.

This year we are proud to celebrate a man from that fast-paced and ever-changing world of telecommunications.

James Q. Crowe, Class of 1972, is a superb exemplar of the entrepreneurial spirit, a man whose ingenious application of science and technology to our shared purposes has tremendous impact worldwide.

Jim is Chief Executive Officer of Level 3 Communications, a $4 billion dollar per year communications and information services company. Level 3 is a Fortune 500 company and is one of the largest providers of wholesale dial-up service to Internet service providers in North America. It is the primary provider of Internet connectivity for millions of broadband subscribers through its cable and Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) partners. Nine out of ten of the world’s largest telecommunications carriers use Level 3 services, as do five of the top six U.S. Internet service providers.

For many of the world’s largest communications companies, Level 3 is — as Sean Connery so wonderfully intones in the company’s new ad campaign — “the network partner you can rely on.”

Level 3 drew its name from the bottom three layers of the seven-layer engineering model of how networks operate — the layers that provide the link and route the data — and it quickly made its mark as the first global network to fully leverage the power of the Internet, using Internet Protocol (IP) technology end-to-end. Its Internet backbone stretches to more than 22,000 miles, a reliable and efficient broadband fiber-optic network spanning the U.S. and Europe, with transatlantic cable systems in between. The company offers IP services, broadband transport, colocation services, and patented Softswitch-based managed modem and voice services.

In April of 2000, Level 3 was inducted into the permanent research collection of the Smithsonian Institution, honored as a Computerworld Smithsonian Laureate for its leadership in the information revolution. As the citation noted then, “the world’s first upgradable international fiber-optic network to be completely optimized for internet protocol technology is helping to stimulate the biggest change in communications technology in 100 years.” Many likened it to the transformation of our nation’s economy that occurred after railroads crisscrossed the nation a century ago — a transformation dear to our hearts at Rensselaer, because we prepared so many of that era’s engineers and builders.

As Computerworld and the Smithsonian so fittingly saw it, Jim’s strategy in building Level 3 is a case study in technological entrepreneurship.

Jim once described his company’s greatest assets as a good team of people, sufficient capital, and a blank sheet of paper. The blank sheet of paper is a wonderful entrepreneurial symbol — the wide-open possibilities; the agility to seize opportunities and harness the potential of radical changes in technology in a way that large established companies often cannot.

For someone who appreciates the power of a blank sheet of paper, it should perhaps come as no surprise that Jim built the Level 3 information pipeline to be not only fast and reliable, but also continually upgradable, without interruptions in service. How? When the company dug its network trenches, it simply put down eight to twelve empty conduits alongside the first “live” one. One of Jim’s innovations was to see the full potential for tomorrow held in ready conduits laid down today.

His fully upgradable network is ready for each new generation of improved fiber-optic cable and the greater cost efficiencies they will bring. More importantly, he understood early on the importance of Internet protocol as a means for responding to market-based technology changes. That is the application of “silicon economics” at its best.

We would, of course, like to think that Jim’s entrepreneurial spirit was nurtured at Rensselaer, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and where, he has said, he learned to appreciate the operations research so important to his enterprise today.

He followed that up with an MBA at Pepperdine University, and his dual background in technology and business is evident in his legendary ability to discourse on the intricacies of bandwidth one minute and discounted cash flow analysis the next.

Jim Crowe and I share career experience in the nuclear power industry — he on the design and operational side, I on the regulatory side, and we had great fun in sharing our stories.

He began his career with the Idaho power plant company Morrison Knudsen, then moved to the venerable Omaha construction firm Peter Kiewit Sons and was introduced into the world of broadband technology.

By 1993, he had founded and taken public MFS Communications, a telecommunications enterprise that became the largest competitive local carrier in the U.S. and Europe.It was a great American success story that established Jim Crowe’s status as “cult hero” in telecommunications entrepreneurship.

In 1996, he sold that company to WorldCom for $14 billion and assumed the chairmanship of the merged enterprise MFS-WorldCom. In 1997, Jim came back to Peter Kiewit to lead an even more ambitious undertaking: the construction of a global network designed around Internet technology. He raised billions of dollars on Wall Street, and Level 3 completed construction of its network in less than two years. In 1999, Jim moved Level 3’s operations to Denver so that he could build his company’s base operation where high-tech talent wanted to live.

It is important at this juncture to acknowledge Jim’s wife Pamela, who was unable to join us this evening, who quickly embraced the Denver community and is making important contributions to it, particularly with charities that work on behalf of children and battered women.

Jim has been called a “prophet of change” in the constantly-evolving telecommunications business, and his long-distance vision has been acutely important in piloting Level 3 through stormy seas and industry sea-changes. The last few years have been especially challenging in the telecommunications arena. The bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000 caught up with the telecommunications sector in 2001 and with broadband technology in 2002.

With broadband capacity now far outstripping demand, Jim faced his shareholders in the summer of 2002 and, in his characteristically straightforward manner, admitted that he had not seen the dotcom meltdown coming. But showing that you cannot get a true entrepreneur down, he reminded them that “in turmoil, there is risk and also opportunity.” In the year since then, Level 3 has been seizing those opportunities with acquisitions such as Genuity Inc., and building in more revenue with services that help its customer companies save money.

Industry observers single out Level 3 as the company that will not only survive the telecommunications crisis, but will likely emerge as the dominant player in wholesale voice-and-data communications.

Of course, entrepreneurs will never be content with mere survival. Looking to the future, Jim asks us to imagine the possibilities for fully lifelike telepresence, the extension of our eyes around the world through Internet technology as powerful and transformative as our mastery in the twentieth century of the phone network, which extended our ears to every corner of the world.

There will be myriad possibilities and much more to be written on Jim’s blank sheet of paper. The world’s leading companies, as the voice of Sean Connery tells us, expect much from Level 3. We do too, and we will be watching it unfold with pride.

His message, that “in turmoil there is risk and also opportunity,” is an important message at this juncture in the history of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Please join me in honoring James Q. Crowe, Class of 1972, as the 2003 Rensselaer Entrepreneur of the Year.