The Sprint Purge at Clearwire Continues — Gude Out
Another veteran from the Sprint side of the merger has been cut loose from the good ship Clearwire, with the company’s announcement Thursday that former chief marketing officer Atish Gude was “leaving to pursue other opportunities.” In other words… See Ya!
When Clearwire brought Bill Morrow in as CEO in March, it was probably to be expected that senior executives from the prior regime were “in play,” so to speak — we’ve reported before on the demotion of Barry West from President to President/International, and most recently Scott Richardson, formerly chief strategy officer, stepped away from Clearwire to pursue more entrepreneurial interests (and also to leave behind the burgeoning bureaucracy). Another exec who got sacked was CFO David Sachs, a short-timer who had the unfortunate timing to join before Morrow was named CEO — if there is any exec a new CEO wants familiarity with, it’s the CFO spot, so you can almost count on any new CEO at any public company bringing in “his own person” before too long.
By canning Gude and naming two more senior execs today — David Maquera, who will take over as senior VP/chief strategy officer, and Thomas Enraght-Moony as senior vice president and GM of CLEAR Online — Clearwire is further down the road of transition from plucky startup to big, bureaucratic service provider. Perhaps that’s a good thing, as the company rapidly adds markets — it never hurts to have more experience on board. And you have to wonder if the poor rollouts in Baltimore and Chicago — both originally Sprint planned and developed — made senior execs like West and Gude damaged goods, at least from a longevity standpoint.
But as we asked before, will Clearwire keep enough innovators around to keep it from falling into the big-service-provider trap? Remember, part of the idea behind the open WiMAX network is that it would be different from business as usual. Clearwire backers should hope bringing in a lot of big-company execs doesn’t make the company lose any entrepreneurial buzz it might still have.
