Charles E. Hoffman

Charles "Charlie" E. Hoffman (born January 27, 1949) is an American business executive, having served two publicly traded companies as CEO for over 10 years. Hoffman was the President and Chief Executive Officer of Covad Communications Group from June 2001 to April 2008. Known as a turnaround artist, Hoffman successfully took Covad through bankruptcy and transformed it into a leading nationwide provider of broadband voice and data communications. He negotiated the sale of the company to Platinum Equity in late 2007, and stepped down from Covad when the acquisition was completed in April 2008.

Prior to joining Covad, Mr. Hoffman was President and Chief Executive Officer of Rogers Wireless, Inc. (formerly publicly traded as Rogers AT&T), Canada's largest, national wireless service provider. He held this position from January 1998 to June 2001. Under his leadership, the company grew from fourth to first place in a market of four national wireless providers. He also successfully negotiated the sale of one-third interest in this publicly traded company (NYSE and TSE) to a partnership of AT&T and British Telecom.

Before Rogers, Hoffman served as President, Northeast region, for Sprint PCS. He was responsible for operations in the largest region in the U.S. and successfully launched PCS wireless service in nine markets. Mr. Hoffman also spent 16 years at SBC Communications (now AT&T) in various senior management positions, including Director General (President) of Telcel, the national wireless carrier in Mexico. During this time, he also served as Managing Director-Wireless for SBC International. Preceding this, Hoffman was President and General Manager of SBC's Cellular One operations, during which he turned around the second and fourth largest SBC markets, Washington/Baltimore and Boston, from underperformers to market leaders in record time.

He is currently a member of the board of directors of Synchronoss Technologies, Softlayer Holdings, and the College of Business Administration at University of Missouri-St. Louis. He previously served on the boards of Chordiant Software and Tollgrade Communications. Both companies were profitably sold while Hoffman served on the board of directors. He attended the Directors College at Stanford University in 2006 and the Corporate Governance program at Northwestern University's Kellogg School in 2009. Hoffman received a bachelor of science and a masters of business administration from University of Missouri, St. Louis. He and his wife Maureen have four children and six grandchildren.