David McCourt

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN

HONORARY CONFERRING

Friday, 9 December 2022 at 5 pm

TEXT OF THE INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS DELIVERED BY PROFESSOR ANTHONY BRABAZON, Principal and Dean of UCD School of Business on 9 December 2022, on the occasion of the conferring of the Degree of Doctor of Economic Science, honoris causa on David Christopher McCourt.

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Acting President, Distinguished Guests, Graduates, Colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen

David McCourt is a proud second generation Irish-American hailing from Watertown, a suburb of Boston. In addition to his Irish lineage, David has very strong direct business and personal links with Ireland, the latter including a home in Co. Clare. He has also close links with University College Dublin having served as a member of the Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business, North American Advisory Board, for many years.

David has been recognised by the Economist magazine as having ‘impeccable credentials as a telecom revolutionary’. In a career spanning over thirty years, he is one of the world’s leading and most successful entrepreneurs in the technology, media and telecommunications industries, having founded or bought over twenty companies in nine countries.

Taking just a selection of his current business and other activities, David is Founder and Chairman of the global investment firm Granahan McCourt Capital, Chairman of National Broadband Ireland, Inaugural Executive in Residence for Entrepreneurial Economics and Innovation at Georgetown University, and Economist in Residence at the University of Southern California Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership & Policy.

Amongst many awards and honours over the years, David has received ‘Entrepreneur of the Year’ awards from Harvard Business School, Georgetown University and Ernst & Young LLP, a Presidential award from US President Ronald Regan recognising extraordinary accomplishments by private sector businesses, the Science Foundation Ireland medal for outstanding contribution to technology and innovation, and recently, the annual 'Businessman of the Year' award from Chambers Ireland.

After High School, David studied at Georgetown University, graduating with a degree in sociology in 1979. After graduation, he worked for 18 months as a probation officer's aide in Washington D.C., venturing into the telecoms industry in 1982, founding his first company at the age of 23 - McCourt Cable Systems.

With cable TV coming to Boston at that time, the company successfully bid for the contract to lay the wires in the ground. This company quickly grew to become the largest privately- owned designer and builder of cable systems in the United States, deploying breakthrough methods of laying cable systems, which would later be adopted as industry standards.

By the late 1980s, David had gained a reputation as a telecoms visionary with the creation of Corporate Communications Network, the first competitive telephone network in the United States. This company was merged with Metropolitan Fibre Systems creating MFS McCourt. MFS was later sold for $14.3 billion to MCI Worldcom.

Many other entrepreneurial ventures in the technology, media and telecommunications industries followed including Discovery TV, expansion into the Mexican telecoms industry, expansion into Europe, and TV and film production. In 2005, David won an Emmy for the series ‘Reading Rainbow’, a long running children's show that encourages reading.

David has been a key player in the development and modernisation of Ireland’s telecommunications system. In 2013, he led a consortium to acquire the Irish Fibre Company, Enet, Ireland’s largest open access network provider in the wholesale telecoms market. The network is used by over 70 telecommunication operators providing broadband across Ireland. Granahan McCourt sold its stake in Enet to the Irish Infrastructure Fund in 2018.

In late 2019, Granahan McCourt became the successful bidder for Ireland's National Broadband Plan. National Broadband Ireland with David serving as Chairman, is tasked with rolling out a future-proofed high-speed broadband network to approximately 600,000 premises and over 1 million people.

It is the biggest single investment project in Ireland since rural electrification and has taken on obvious added significance in the wake of the global Covid pandemic and the move to remote working.

As David has commented: "The project is about radically changing the broadband landscape across the country to ensure that every man, woman and child has access to high-speed broadband, no matter where they live or work. It is going to be transformational for Ireland. This will become the blueprint for other nations around the world as we move towards a gigabit economy."

Granahan McCourt has a wide range of other investments, spanning several countries, including an insurtech start-up, and continues to produce pioneering media content through its subsidiary McCourt Entertainment.

David is often asked for insights as to the secrets of his success and he comments that he became an entrepreneur for the joy of doing things differently, to rethink business models and to change things in ways that would eventually bring benefits to everyone.

A key element in the positioning of his investments has been a willingness to place himself and his partners at the nexus of regulatory, consumer and technological change, this ferment creating the opportunities for an entrepreneur to completely disrupt an industry and create significant additional value for everyone.

Drawing on a quote from Einstein, David notes that: “Logic will get you from A to B, imagination will get you everywhere”.

As for the other secrets of his success, and David’s perspectives on how we need to rethink our behaviours and decision-making processes – to move beyond the incremental – and to meet the grand societal challenges now facing us, well I’ll refer you to David’s recent book 'Total Rethink: Why Entrepreneurs Should Act Like Revolutionaries', published by Wiley in 2018, and which became a Wall Street Journal bestseller in 2019.

In honouring David McCourt today, we honour a visionary who has reshaped and is continuing to reshape the telecommunications industry in the US, Ireland and beyond.

We also honour a person who has given back in many ways including through his mentoring, support, and encouragement of young entrepreneurs to follow their dreams and seize opportunity.

Praehonorabilis Praeses, totaque Universitas,

Praesento vobis hunc meum filium, quem scio tam moribus quam doctrina habilem et idoneum esse qui admittatur, honoris causa, ad gradum Doctoratus utroque Jure, tam Civili quam Canonico; idque tibi fide mea testor ac spondeo, totique Academiae.