As for his technology work, Genachowski co-founded LaunchBox Digital and is a managing director there as well as at Rock Creek Ventures. He also served as a special adviser at General Atlantic and worked for eight years as a senior executive at IAC/InterActive.
Genachowski was raised in New York and now lives in Washington, DC.
At the eComm conference, a gathering of developers and vendors of next-generation telecommunications services, two executives were cautiously optimistic about what Genachowski's FCC will achieve.
Jonathan Taylor, president and CEO of Voxeo, likes what he's heard from the Obama administration on telecommunications competition. His company provides voice over Internet Protocol and interactive voice response services. But most rivals of the dominant carriers and cable operators didn't survive the lobbyist-driven policies of the last administration, he said.
"I think there's more desire (for service-provider diversity) but not much more ability to do it," Taylor said.
Jamie Siminoff is also more optimistic about the FCC under an Obama appointee. He is founder and CEO of SimulScribe, which operates text-based voicemail provider PhoneTag, and of Grid.com, a startup launched Tuesday to help service providers develop new services.
Succeeding in the phone business often involves working around FCC regulations, Siminoff said. A former company he worked for dropped out of the VoIP business after the FCC imposed 911 emergency calling requirements on that industry, he said. But no matter what the government shuts down, there is always a way to make money. For example, there are ways to innovate if the FCC strengthens network neutrality, and other ways to do so if it pulls back its support for the policy, he said.
"The communications business is so big, it's a fire hose," Siminoff said. "Regulation can't stop innovation. When has innovation stopped in America?"
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