Life and Career
Born in New Jersey, U.S., and raised in Oradell, New Jersey, she is the daughter of Annabelle (née Hewitt) and John Kenneth Forester, president and owner of the General Aviation Company, now Meridian in Teterboro, N.J., she is a Phi Beta Kappa magna cum laude graduate of Pomona College and an honors graduate of Columbia Law School. She also studied international law at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. From 1980-1984, she was an associate at the Simpson Thacher & Bartlett law firm.
Lynn Forester de Rothschild has stated that her first business success came at the age of 16 when she bought US made blue jeans and brought them to sell in Israel during her vacation there and sold them for up to ten times what they had originally cost her.
After meeting telecommunications billionaire John Kluge while doing legal work for him as a law firm associate, she became Executive Vice President for Development at Metromedia Inc from 1984-1989. From 1989 to 2002, Lynn Forester de Rothschild owned and operated various telecommunication companies worldwide that revolutionized the broadband and wireless industries. From 1989 to 1995, Lady de Rothschild was the majority shareholder, Chairman and CEO, of TPI Communications International, Inc., one of the largest providers of paging, wireless data and cellular telephone service in Latin America, owned with Motorola. While under her management, TPI tripled its size and per-customer revenues, and cash flow grew to three times the U.S. average. In addition, she expanded operations from Puerto Rico into Latin America. TPI was sold in a private transaction for an undisclosed sum in the mid-90s.
In 1995, Lady de Rothschild pioneered the broadband wireless industry when she founded FirstMark Communications Inc, in the United States. In 1997, she sold her US interests in order to focus on international opportunities. In 1998, she founded FirstMark Communications of Europe, with the mission of building a pan-European broadband Internet company. Having secured licenses in Germany, France, Spain, Switzerland, Luxembourg and Finland and built a 20,000 klm fiber network in 15 countries, she sold the company in June 2000, in the largest private equity placement in the history of the European competitive telecommunications sector.Boasted on its Board of Directors Nathan Myhrvold of Microsoft, Washington D.C. power broker Vernon Jordan and Henry Kissinger. The company was sold in June 2000 in a $1 billion financing, the largest private equity placement in the history of the European competitive telecommunications sector. In discussing her personal business success between 1989 and 2000, Forester has said: "I think a lot of it is that I was lucky...most of all I learned that it's better to be lucky than to be smart."
Lady de Rothschild serves on the Board of Directors of Estée Lauder Companies, The Economist Group, Weather Central LLC and Christies International. Previously, she served on the Boards of Directors of Gulfstream Aerospace Corporation and General Instruments, Inc.
Read more about this topic: Lynn Forester De Rothschild
Famous quotes containing the words life and/or career:
“Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. They lived in their writings, and so their house and street life was trivial and commonplace. If you would know their tastes and complexions, the most admiring of their readers most resembles them.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)