David C. McCourt

For over 25 years, David C. McCourt, Chairman and CEO of Granahan McCourt Capital has been an innovator, entrepreneur, and business leader across the construction, communications and media industries.   He has founded or bought 14 companies in 7 countries, and is widely recognized as a transformational force in the telecommunications business.  The Economist described him as having "impeccable credentials as a telcom revolutionary".

Most recently, Mr. McCourt formed Satellite Holdings, LLC (a partnership between Granahan McCourt Capital and The Edgewater Funds) as a vehicle to acquire and consolidate companies in the satellite industry.  Having completed 3 acquisitions in 2009, Satellite Holdings has quickly and quietly become the world's leader in integrated satellite communications terminal equipment.  Mr. McCourt currently serves as Chairman and CEO of Satellite Holdings LLC and its operating entity, Skyware Global.   He describes satellite technology as "the most underappreciated opportunity in the next phase         
                                  of telecom."

One of seven children, David McCourt was raised in Watertown, Massachusetts, and graduated from Georgetown University. In 1982, he created his first company, McCourt Cable Systems, which quickly became the largest privately owned designer and builder of cable systems in the country.  The breakthrough methods he deployed to lay cable systems would, 15 years later, become the industry standard. During this same time period, Mr. McCourt also founded the Grenadian TV station, Discovery TV, which was eventually sold to the Grenadian government. By the late eighties, Mr. McCourt had also built Corporate Communications Network, Amercia's first competitive phone company, later merging it with MFS Communications, which was sold to WorldCom for 14.3 billion dollars.

For his next venture, Mr. McCourt forged an alliance with Peter Kiewit Sons, Inc., (PKS) the world-renowned engineering and construction firm.  Together they formed the London-based McCourt/Kiewit International, which quickly became the largest designer and builder of residential cable television and telephone networks in Europe.  These new networks and the creation of the first competitive cable systems in the UK, foreshadowed the surge of new network construction in the United States in the last decade.

In the mid-1990's, Mr. McCourt, as Chairman and CEO of C-TEC, a diversified telecommunications company based in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, recapitalized the company, and monetized several non-strategic subsidiaries.  He then engineered a tax free split of the company into four publicly traded companies: RCN Corporation, Cable Michigan, Inc., Mercom, Inc., and Commonwealth Telephone Enterprises, Inc.  The  combined annualized returns of the companies spun-off C-TEC are approximately three times the returns of the S&P 500 over the same time period.