Brice Scheschuk founded Wind Mobile after Canada opened its wireless market to new competitors in 2007. When the spectrum auction required a $215 million deposit in 2008, his team had exhausted traditional funding. An Egyptian billionaire wired $200 million in 10 days through intermediary Nagib Suiras, letting them make the deadline.
Questions this video answers
2007
Early 2008
$200 million
$215 million
Nagib Suiras
Chapters
Now you're at the point of starting Win Mobile. Walk us through that story, because that's an incredible story. The government policy came out in 07 that said we need to introduce competition to this actually ludicrous oligopoly when you talk about it. And we had enough under our belt to be. But yet we're brazen enough to say we can go take on Rogers Tellison Bell. So we were a little. We were naive, aggressive and had a little bit of experience. So this policy thing comes out and we start kicking this around and Anthony's getting more and more. I use the term agitated, but this sounds negative agitated in a good way. We need to do this. This. We. We just had. We had built this thing that I said to 120 million in revenue. We were about a year from our last acquisition. And when things stabilize and get integrated, that's bad news for us because we need to do something next. And so we kick it around for a little while and then it is, we gotta move. We spend early 2008 doing that. And the one thing about wireless is that there is a hard deadline for new entrant opportunities driven by the act of acquiring Spectrum. Okay? So in Canada, in that era, you had to deposit a substantial sum of money that determined how much Spectrum you could bid on. So to have a viable company, you need to deposit a lot of money to be in the game. And you get the right on whatever frequency and geography to be the sole user of that. So the government says Rogers Telson Bell cannot bid on certain frequencies, which means there will be competition. We get together, we do this business planning exercise, we go on a fundraising process the likes of which I've never seen, I don't think I will ever see again in my time. We go around the world. We are looking for real capital that can go a distance, fighting an oligopoly, okay? And we were completely naive even in terms of what we thought. We were stalling out. Things were starting to fall apart. In the World Credit Crisis, 2008. We thought we were close with an Icelandic billionaire who was very interested in Canadian wireless. We thought we were close with a couple of others and they just kept falling apart. We couldn't stick it, couldn't stick the landing. And then literally, I think it was 11 days before the deadline. The network is very tuned up, referring people to us, and lots of it's being discarded and it's very like there's no time. And we end up through literally five degrees of separation. Get to an Egyptian billionaire, all these big wireless moguls have a guy or a group that is tasked with looking around the world for where the next opportunity might be. And this guy was from Peterborough, Ontario, working in Cairo, knew the Canadian market, and actually wanted to come home. So, with 10 days, basically a set of events happen, starting with Anthony flying to Cairo and meeting the gentleman named Nagib Suiras, to a whole army of his people coming into Canada. A very hastily rushed negotiation to get an agreement to basically get a deposit to put with the government and to agree. Then after that, on terms for the actual auction, literally with, like, two days to go. The Egyptian billionaire wired us $200 million on that agreement. And we went to Ottawa, and we deposited this $215 million check with the government as a deposit for the Spectrum auction. That's how close we were to not doing the project.
