David P. Glickman and the price of calling home

An international telephone bill is an unusually dull object to build a career around. It has no glamour, little suspense and a remarkable ability to make a conversation with someone you love seem like a budgeting error. David P. Glickman found something useful in that irritation. Working in Buenos Aires after college, he discovered a way to reduce international calling costs by 75 percent. He started Justice Technology, returned to the United States and began turning an expensive inconvenience into a business.

The sequence matters. Before the companies and their valuations came a customer’s problem, experienced at close range. His later career would include TelePacific, the business now known as TPx, and the wireless brands Ultra Mobile and Mint Mobile. The equipment changed. The recurring commercial question remained wonderfully plain: could people get the connection they wanted without paying so much for it?

Glickman was born and raised in Los Angeles. He studied entrepreneurial management at Wharton and earned a master’s in psychology at UCLA. His early American Express work in Argentina put marketing and operations alongside those two educations. It is an interesting combination for a telephone entrepreneur: an understanding of a business, an interest in the person buying from it, and an overseas posting that made the cost of communication personal.

A California phone company, one copper pair at a time

Justice Technology reached the top of the Inc. 500 in 1998. A contemporary executive biography records revenue rising from $200,000 in 1993 to nearly $100 million in 1999. Those figures describe an operating business expanding across several years, rather than a valuation briefly enjoying the weather. They also put some substance behind the later shorthand of “serial entrepreneur.” Before the shorthand, there were customers making calls.

TelePacific followed, with Glickman as founder, chairman and chief executive. A 2015 institutional biography describes $225 million raised from investors and a business that grew to a $500 million valuation. The venture took him into the competitive local telephone market, selling the connections businesses needed to get through an ordinary working day. The present TPx name belongs to that company’s subsequent history; Glickman’s place in it begins with TelePacific.

One moment captures the practical ambition. In July 1999, TelePacific, Jetstream and Cisco demonstrated multiple phone lines and continuous internet access over a single DSL circuit for First American Bank in Los Angeles. One copper twisted pair could support equipment delivering up to 16 traditional telephone lines alongside internet service. A piece of wire was being asked to do considerably more work. The customer, naturally, was interested in the bill.

Glickman’s public remarks at the demonstration emphasized combining voice, data and internet services to meet changing business needs at competitive cost. Strip away the period vocabulary and the proposition still sounds familiar. Businesses wanted several things to work together. They wanted fewer compromises and a price that made sense. TelePacific’s engineering partners supplied the machinery; the commercial task was making that machinery useful enough to buy.

When cash flow acquired a certain charm

Then came the less decorative side of the telecom era. By June 2003, Glickman was still TelePacific’s chairman, but he was also building Glickman Capital as a buyout firm. After the technology bubble, his interest had shifted toward stable businesses producing cash. An initial list of 200 privately held Los Angeles companies became five candidates. He bought two and was negotiating for another.

The acquisitions included a supplier of ocean saltwater to aquariums and fish importers, and a wheel manufacturer. A portfolio containing both telephone connections and aquarium water does require a slightly longer introduction at dinner. It also suggests an investor willing to look beyond the category that had made his name.

“I look for companies that have very strong cash flow and are stable,” he said. There is a useful change of emphasis in that sentence. A valuation tells you what someone might pay for a business. Cash flow helps determine whether the business can keep paying its own way. Glickman had encountered enough of the former to become interested in the latter.

“I look for companies that have very strong cash flow and are stable.”

David Glickman / 2003

The customer was not waiting for an internet ad

Telecom kept drawing him back. Between Justice and Ultra, Glickman founded or co-owned seven other telecom ventures. Repetition gave him a store of market knowledge, relationships and examples of what could fail. His career was accumulating the sort of experience that rarely fits inside a launch announcement: knowing which apparently fresh opportunity resembles something tried before, and which difficulty deserves another attempt.

Ultra Mobile provided that attempt. Its international calling proposition grew out of experience with Hometown Telecom’s IndiaLD service. The intention was to make inexpensive overseas communication part of a mobile plan, without the extra steps of a calling-card service. A customer could buy talk, text and data together. “No access numbers. No PINs.” The little sentence contained a large part of the product argument.

Getting that customer was harder. Online acquisition methods that had worked for IndiaLD proved expensive for Ultra, with costs around $250 per customer. A web advertisement was asking people to change their mobile carrier. The team took its pitch to independent wireless stores and distributors at a wireless convention. Within months, Ultra was in roughly 3,000 stores; by Glickman’s 2015 account, it was in about 25,000.

In 2015, Ultra reached No. 1 on the Inc. growth ranking, giving Glickman a second company at the top after Justice in 1998. Ultra’s 2014 revenue was $118 million. The two rankings sit 17 years apart. That interval makes the story more interesting: the second business applied accumulated knowledge, then adjusted when a familiar marketing method failed. Experience supplied a starting point. Customers still got a vote.

An office needs more than a bowl of snacks

Glickman’s writing about management can be less cuddly than a casual office photograph might suggest. In a 2016 essay, he argued that tolerating poor performance can drive away the employees a company most wants to keep. People with strong records have other options. A manager who avoids an awkward decision may simply be asking better colleagues to absorb its consequences.

He acknowledged that his good-employee, bad-employee example was a simplification. The underlying concern was the working environment that management allows to persist. Culture, in this account, carries obligations. Someone has to notice who is doing the work, who is making it harder, and what happens when the second group is left undisturbed.

His shorter growth advice pairs delegation with attention to people. “Do only what you do best,” he advised; “It is always about the people.” Together, those ideas place limits on the founder’s centrality. Hiring capable colleagues is expensive theater if every meaningful decision still has to pass through the founder. Giving people room, resources and responsibility makes the hiring matter.

Mint’s famous face and the founders behind it

Mint Mobile brought a different kind of visibility. Glickman and co-founder Rizwan Kassim built the brand; Ryan Reynolds became an owner and its recognizable public presence. That arrangement can make the origins blur in popular memory. A celebrity’s involvement is easy to remember. The less visible history includes the founders, the operating team and years spent learning how people buy wireless service.

In March 2023, T-Mobile announced an agreement to acquire Ka’ena Corporation, the parent of Mint, Ultra and wholesale provider Plum, for up to $1.35 billion. The announced mix was 39 percent cash and 61 percent stock, with the final consideration dependent on performance and contractual adjustments. The number described an acquisition agreement for a group of businesses. It was never a statement of Glickman’s personal wealth.

T-Mobile completed the acquisition on May 1, 2024. Glickman and Kassim joined alongside their teams to continue driving the brands, while Reynolds continued in his creative role. The businesses would operate autonomously while remaining aligned with the broader company. For Glickman, the buyer was also the network partner on which the wireless brands had already been built.

The close therefore joined two sides of an existing commercial relationship. T-Mobile wanted the brands’ customer relationships and digital marketing capabilities; the brands gained access to the scale of their network owner. Building a recognizable name on someone else’s infrastructure had produced something that the infrastructure owner wanted to acquire. There is a neat business-school case in that, though the customers were mostly interested in their next renewal.

The next invoice might be for cashmere

Glickman Capital’s current presentation has a distinctly personal filter. It seeks investments that an eight-year-old version of the investor would be proud to join, and puts enjoyment, creativity and the people involved into its selection language. Its listed holdings range across wireless, aerospace, artificial intelligence, food, luxury goods and sport. The portfolio includes SpaceX, Anthropic, Liquid Death and Leeds United, among others.

A portfolio list does not tell us the size of each stake. It does show how far the investment brief now reaches beyond phone service. The firm describes itself with the temperament of a private club, placing weight on whether the participants will enjoy working together. After a career selling better economics, Glickman’s investment language makes room for whether the work will be worth doing in the first place.

In March 2025, Glickman Capital acquired Malo, the Italian cashmere house, in partnership with Naga Brands. Michelle Kessler-Sanders was named chief executive, taking up the role in June. The acquisition price was undisclosed. Malo remained based in Florence, with plans for an office and showroom in Milan. In November, a new capsule collection marked its return to selected Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus stores in the United States.

By September 2026, Glickman was appearing in another Italian setting: a fashion-show account placed him in Taormina with his daughter Riley, an archaeologist, attending Dolce & Gabbana’s Alta Sartoria presentation. The telephone entrepreneur had become a customer of rather different craftsmanship. His career now makes room for both the economics of a cheaper connection and the appeal of something carefully made. One began with the cost of calling home. The other requires a little more wardrobe space.