I always peer closely to see what venture capitalists are doing. So it was with some interest that I noted David Hytha, formerly Executive VP of Terminals at T-Mobile Europe, has joined Sofinnova Ventures. David was part of the team who launched Web’n’Walk, the first major carrier in my experience to launch open access to the internet at reasonable prices. T-Mobile UK kickstarted the country’s data market and, ultimately, forced the other players to work out the own ‘unlimited’ offerings. Kudos David. I was one of the first users of that.
David’s been around the wireless industry. He started first at AT&T in the early 1980s, establishing both its semiconductor business in Japan, and its wireless infrastructure operations in Japan. He then founded the first department of Bell Laboratories outside the United States. Fast forward to 1994 and David developed new businesses for AT&T/McCaw Cellular and started what became FarEasTone, a major GSM operator in Taiwan. While at Motorola in 1994, David was awarded the world’s first 3GSM handset contract with NTT DoCoMo. Nifty. David was also CEO of LGC Wireless, where he shipped the world’s first distributed mobile antenna systems. Then, In 1998 he joined Silicon Wave where he shipped the world’s first standards-compliant Bluetooth chipset, which sold to RFMD in 2003.
He then joined T-Mobile Europe in 2003. That’s a bit of a career and a half, eh?
He’s now Executive-in-Residence at Sofinnova so if you’ve got an investment opportunity in the mobile sector, it might be worth dropping him a note. You can catch him via sofinnova.com.