Management Team
David E. Scott, 48, and David M. Hollingsworth, 42, are the managing members of Avid Communications, LLC. Both have spent their entire careers within the telecommunications industry, and have experience in all of the relevant market segments to the strategy of Avid.Scott holds a Bachelors of Science degree in Electrical Engineering, summa cum laude, from the University of Missouri-Columbia and a Master’s of Business Administration from the University of Chicago. Scott held a variety of strategic planning, marketing and business development positions in a ten-year career at Sprint Corporation, and was particularly involved in the company’s strategies to take advantage of both the deregulation of the long distance market (in the mid-1980s) and local phone market (in the early 1990s). Scott’s last position at Sprint was Vice President of Strategic Development.
David M. Hollingsworth holds a Bachelors of Arts degree in Business Administration from Washington State University. Hollingsworth began his career with the Ernst & Young Telecommunications Consulting Group and in 1991 joined Sprint Corporation, working in the Mergers and Acquisitions group.
In 1993, Scott joined Kansas City Fibernet, a small competitor to Southwestern Bell Telephone that was owned by Time Warner Cable, as its President. Later that year, Hollingsworth joined Scott at Fibernet as Director of Finance and Administration. Under Scott and Hollingsworth, Fibernet grew rapidly to become one of the largest and most successful companies in the country competing directly with the local phone monopolies. Fibernet became a joint venture of the nation’s two largest cable firms: TCI and Time Warner.
Fibernet was the first company to be certified to provide competitive local phone service in both Kansas and Missouri, and Scott was a leader nationally and in Missouri and Kansas in pushing for industry deregulation. Fibernet was eventually sold to TCG, the nation’s largest Bell competitor, which was shortly thereafter sold to AT&T. The estimated value of the Fibernet assets at the time of the AT&T acquisition of TCG was $175 million--a substantial return on the $20 million investment by Fibernet’s owners.
In late 1996, Scott left Fibernet to found Birch Telecom, Inc. Hollingsworth took a position with Portland-based GST Telecommunications as Vice President of Finance and Corporate Development. While at GST, Hollingsworth was responsible for strategic planning, corporate development, mergers and acquisitions, financial analysis and operational analysis.
Backed by $200 million in private equity by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR) and other private equity firms, Birch grew rapidly to become one of the country’s largest competitive local exchange providers (CLECs), operating in 40 metropolitan areas and serving over 150,000 customers and 500,000 phone lines. Birch was an early leader in the integration of local and long distance services, and, subsequently, data services. In 1999, Scott was named Midwest Entrepreneur of the Year and Kansas City’s Technologist of the Year.
After seven years at the helm, Scott left Birch in 2004 to take advantage of softswitch-based IP networking technology and begin preparations for Avid Communications. Hollingsworth left Birch in late 2004 and joined Scott in laying the foundation for Avid.