Although Carphone CEO Charles Dunstone had identified the market, co-founder David Ross was instrumental in taking the firm outside the UK. He was credited with controlling costs, helping facilitate the company’s IPO in July 2000 and was responsible for pushing the company into Europe.
Sources say that it was Ross who carried out all the negotiations with service providers such as Talkland, Securicor and Millicom in the early days. He was also instrumental in the purchase of Tandy stores, but sources said he was bad at dealing with people and that he had a ’terrible temper’.
More recently, Ross took more of a back seat at Carphone and was only involved with the ‘big ticket stuff’, such as the AOL and Best Buy deals.