Word: citrons
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That may sound like entrepreneurial bluster, but Citron has set off alarm bells at the big telephone carriers, who proved once already that they weren't swift enough to react when they ignored the challenge of cell phones. Before Vonage, telecom giants like MCI, Verizon and AT&T dismissed the technology for broadband phone service as too buggy and too complicated to bother selling. Vonage has proved them wrong, mostly because broadband phone service has one compelling advantage: price. It's half as expensive as regular telephone service. The company now has 220,000 subscribers, a pittance beside...
...Jeffrey Citron might have been prewired to be a telecom mogul. In 1987 he was a know-it-all high school kid in Staten Island, N.Y., restless and bored with his classes, when an economics teacher organized a stock-picking game. Citron was soon hooked. Just after the market crash of 1987, he bought stock in phone upstart MCI at a few dollars a share. It soared. "I don't know if I was smart or I got lucky, but it was one of the few stocks I picked that brought a profit," Citron recalls. After finishing high school...
Aggressive and driven, Citron built and sold two hugely successful financial-services companies within 10 years, netting more than $200 million before he was forced out of finance by an SEC investigation that accused him of stock manipulation. He paid a massive fine--$22.5 million--but admitted no wrongdoing. Instead of slinking into well-heeled obscurity, he plotted his return, this time determined to shake up a new industry. Citron, 33, is now CEO of Vonage, which has become, in 18 months, the leading player in the explosive new market for home-phone service via high-speed Web connections, known...
Vonage is likely to lose some of that price advantage eventually, as the Federal Communications Commission figures out how to regulate Internet phone service. What Citron is desperately trying to avoid is a patchwork of state regulations--a logistical nightmare for Vonage. Since Vonage customers can select any area code they want and use their service not just at home but also anywhere they have a broadband connection, tax collection gets tricky. "How do I know where you are?" Citron says. "How do I know who to give the money to? I can't possibly get it right...
...BUSINESS INTERNET: Maverick Jeffrey Citron is shaking up the web phone...