Fred Wilson, the head of Union Square Ventures and the “godfather” of venture capital in New York, took to his personal blog this weekend to tell everyone he’s switching back to T-Mobile.
Wilson blogs about anything going on in his life at avc.com. He was one of the earliest venture capitalists to use a blog effectively. He recently went on the record with his thoughts about the new (and now almost near death) iPhone 5C and now he’s taken the time to let everyone know why he started with T-Mobile and he’s going back to T-Mobile.
T-Mobile is the fourth largest wireless carrier in the United States. Lately though, it seems that the carrier, that’s part of an international conglomerate of wireless carriers with the same name, is looking to win the customer service war. Many of the things they’ve done over the last 12 months are widely used already across the world.
T-Mobile is now offering international unlimited calling, and international data plans that aren’t going to kill your pocketbook. While Wilson is a very successful venture capitalist, he is also rather thrifty and with that he insists that “T-Mobile Rocks”.
Wilson says that his whole family was on T-Mobile and one by one his family started switching to AT&T, which at the time was the sole carrier for the iPhone. When managing two cell phone bills became too much of a headache Wilson switched to AT&T as well. He reports that he spends $2000 a month with AT&T.
“I am going back to T Mobile. Not because AT&T sucks. It doesn’t. Not because AT&T costs me a lot of money. It does.
I am going back out of principle. T-Mobile is customer friendly. The others are not. Maybe Sprint, now that it is owned by SOFTBANK, will join T-Mobile in the customer friendly aisle of the mobile carrier church, but right now they are on the other side.”
Wilson cites a post by New York Times writer David Pogue. That post, highlighting something important that T-Mobile’s Chief Marketing Officer recently said, that could be applied to any business, yes even your startup:
“Those other companies sit around trying to figure out what customer charges they can get away with. We sit around and say, ‘What can we get away with not charging the customer’?”
In some degrees it’s close to the mantra Jason Fried lives by with BaseCamp, and a theme that some of the most successful startups in the world are living by.
So there, you can learn a startup lesson from Fred Wilson switching wireless carriers, and of course you could save your startup some bucks by switching yourself.
