It might be tempting to dismiss Craig McCaw’s success as a lucky bet on a single technology: cellular phones. In fact, author O. Casey Corr writes, McCaw succeeded because he was always betting on all kinds of technology. Though a lot of his picks were duds, he never lost much on the failures, and he earned billions on his big success.

In the excerpt that follows, we meet the young McCaw as he begins the quest for that goal.

One day in the fall of 1979, Craig McCaw sat in the cab of a mobile home, riding toward his future. McCaw was headed south on Washington’s Interstate 5, bound for a conference near Portland, Ore., that was devoted to a new kind of service being developed principally by AT&T: cellular telephones.

Traveling with him were several men from Seattle who shared his curiosity, including Gordon Kelley, who was driving the mobile home. Kelley’s family owned small paging companies in Seattle, running an operation that was typical of the modest-size paging operations of the time. In 1936, his family had started Kelley’s Telephone Answering Service, a 24-hour service using human operators. The Kelleys got their first radio license so that another family business, automobile towing, could have two-way communication with its drivers. The family got into paging almost by happenstance, after realizing that the same radio airwaves could be used to enhance the telephone-answering business.

In 1979, many operators in paging considered cellular the next logical step in the use of radio spectrum—but not necessarily a rival to the telephone. The freedom of mobile communication offered by cellular service looked like something the public would want, but the costs to build a system were daunting and apparently out of reach for any small, independent company. Who could afford to spend millions of dollars to build a host of transmission towers and switches? Who could persuade a customer to spend thousands of dollars for a single phone? And who would be crazy enough to compete with Ma Bell—even assuming the government would allow competition?

All the men in the mobile home were, by virtue of their paging companies’ relationships with the Federal Communications Commission, well-positioned to hear about new radio technologies. But the risks scared nearly everyone.

They attracted 30-year-old Craig McCaw. Something about his personality made him zig when everyone else zagged; perhaps the chaos that frightened others made him calm. (Not that the men riding with him that autumn day were to benefit from his thinking. "Craig always had a mystique about him," says Charlie Desmond, one of the men in the mobile home. "You’d go out for drinks with the others, but never Craig....He wasn’t one to give you insight into what he was going to do.")

McCaw had entered the paging business almost by accident when a paging company in Centralia, Wash., sought permission to attach a small transmitter to an antenna owned by Twin City Cablevision, a cable-TV business started by McCaw’s father, the wheeling-and-dealing Elroy McCaw. Craig McCaw already knew about pagers from his father, who in 1962 had carried one of Seattle’s first to help showcase the technology at that year’s Century 21 Exposition.

Elroy, a volunteer official of the fair, did little with his pager; he mostly left it at home to beep until its battery went dead. Staying in touch was not Elroy’s strong suit. But his son could see that cable TV and cellular had much in common. Both were regulated by the FCC. Both involved transmitters and towers, and assigned radio spectrum. The businesses had common engineering issues, such as signal interference. Both businesses were often supported by the same lenders and brokers.

Furthermore, the business fundamentals of paging appealed to McCaw. Pagers sold easily to physicians, salespeople, and others who needed to stay in contact with the office. The devices, McCaw figured, would become even more attractive as the units’ size shrank and volume drove down prices. A company could offer regional service by accumulating several licenses for neighboring markets. No powerful competitor dominated a market. The paging business represented the sort of quiet, steady backwater business with strong growth potential that appealed to a person like McCaw, who, like his father, avoided the spotlight.

So, by spending $50,000 on hardware and by broadcasting a picture of a pager on his cable-TV system as a means of advertising, McCaw had become a small licensee of radio spectrum by the time he sat in the rolling mobile home. But why would he want to look at a third business, when two already consumed his time?

A ready explanation is that McCaw habitually hunted for new technologies. Years later, after he sold McCaw Cellular Communications to AT&T for billions and made billions more from Nextel Communications and Nextlink, people would assume that the McCaw vision was to lock on to one technology and ride it. Not true. McCaw always attended presentations of new gadgetry. You could always find him playing with some kind of new phone or betting a few dollars on promising technology ideas that might fail. Most did flop, or didn’t succeed soon enough. McCaw liked AT&T’s EO Personal Communicator, a small device that read handwriting, and Steve Jobs’s black-cube Next computer, which featured an operating system to rival Microsoft’s Windows. Both failed. But McCaw kept watching changes in technology, measuring each innovation against his sense of the future.

For, if McCaw had a vision of his role as a businessman, it was to imagine what people would need in the future to make their lives better, and then provide it. As he told the American Academy of Achievement: "It’s your job [as businesspeople] to think almost anthropologically about humanity and say, ‘What would be in their best interest?’ And then try to get there first, and know that eventually they will learn that what you have is worth their while. If I ever got a vision in business, it was the Field of Dreams mentality [that ‘if you build it they will come’]. That’s how I’ve really operated in my career."

As the group of paging operators arrived for the cellular conference at a hotel in Tualatin, near Portland, the FCC still hadn’t solidified its cellular policy. AT&T had done much of the early research but was then under threat of breakup because of a Justice Department antitrust suit. The FCC was trying to decide how to apportion cellular’s 40 megahertz of radio bandwidth in each marketplace, or four times the spectrum allocated to a typical AM radio station.

At the conference, many in the audience were impressed to hear about what cellular could do, but they were dismayed at the cost. A system to serve Seattle would cost about $5 million. Someone at the conference suggested that the small paging companies band together, each contributing $10,000 to start a partnership. McCaw immediately said he would. In March 1980, even before the FCC decided how it would issue cellular telephone licenses, McCaw and others formed a partnership called Northwest Mobile Telephone. Its purpose: to grab a share of those licenses.

While it was too early to know just how cellular would develop, any radio spectrum that McCaw won would be a gift of virgin territory, free from the government—something for nothing. If it had any value at all, it would be money from thin air. "It’s got to be worth something, for God’s sake," McCaw said.

More importantly, McCaw thought the mobile telephone held huge promise. He knew that despite the obvious frustrations of the then almost prohibitively expensive systems (which filled early users’ car trunks), people appreciated their convenience when the balky devices did work. McCaw, himself, used a mobile phone and loved it. For a free spirit like McCaw, who preferred to come and go without schedules or interference, the liberating effect of wireless communication was exciting. He was impatient to see the devices improve. He knew they would—it was just a matter of a breakthrough. Eventually, technology would catch up to the dream.

The idea of cellular service connected deeply with McCaw’s sense of people’s yearnings. He felt that people, deep down, preferred to roam, not restricted to fixed places. The telephone tied them down. As he would later explain, cellular let humans become nomads, the lifestyle that he preferred.

"With cellular telephony, in particular, we saw an enormous gap between what was and what should be," he said years later. "I mean, [the fixed-phone system] makes absolutely no sense. It is machines dominating human beings. The idea that people went to a small cubicle, a six-by-10 office, and sat there all day at the end of a six-foot cord, was anathema to me. If one thing is obvious, it is that people will pay something for control of their lives, the right to choose. And...people were being subjugated needlessly to 1890 technology."

His belief in cellular was so strong that McCaw took big risks. While his partners were cautious about committing money to cellular, once McCaw saw appropriate controls that would limit his downside, he was willing to put up the money far sooner and in far bigger amounts than his partners at the time (or his rivals later). McCaw’s big bet on cellular flowed from his experience in cable, where the smart players carried huge debt loads. If spectrum was an asset to be gathered, McCaw would play Monopoly, collecting as many licenses as he could. By borrowing to buy those assets, "he played with other people’s money," says Richard Callahan, who ran U S West’s first cellular operation and closely monitored McCaw’s growth.

On June 7, 1982, McCaw, only nine years out of college and the owner of a collection of tiny cable TV and pager companies, applied for cellular licenses for Seattle and Portland with his partners.

The FCC’s first "gold rush" that day was for the 30 largest market areas, such as New York, Chicago, and Boston. AT&T’s 57,600 pages of applications arrived at the FCC by truck. That had been entirely predictable. But the applications were astonishing for what they didn’t include.

Not one of the big technology companies, such as Boeing, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, or EDS, had applied. Neither had Disney, nor any television or radio network. McCaw thought cellular was going to be a huge business for commuters, yet no car companies had applied. If General Motors had installed a car phone in each of its cars, the unit costs would have plummeted and GM would have jump-started the industry. Indeed, by some estimates, revenue from GM’s cellular business could have exceeded its car revenue. [For more on GM’s recent communications strategy, see "Wishing on an OnStar."]

By 1987, many twists and turns later, McCaw Cellular Communications had gone public. Amazingly, with so many big companies ignoring the market, it had accumulated a nationwide collection of cellular licenses. McCaw had even outmaneuvered the cellular pioneer, mighty AT&T, which in November 1992 signed a deal to buy an initial stake in McCaw Cellular.

On the day the transaction was announced, 9,000 new U.S. customers signed up for cellular service, bringing the total to some 10 million. Analysts had predicted that number wouldn’t be reached until the year 2000. [The number of cellular customers in the U.S. was more than 86 million at the start of the year.] Traditional market analysis and methods for setting corporate strategy couldn’t match McCaw’s instinctive curiosity about technology, his understanding of customer yearnings, and his willingness to bet big.

From the book Money From Thin Air by O. Casey Corr. Copyright © 2000 by O. Casey Corr. Reprinted with permission of Crown Publishers, a division of Random House Inc.