FAITH IN FIBER CAPITALIZING ON SHIFTING INTERNET TRENDS--AND A WILLINGNESS TD SAY 'NO'--ENABLED DAVID MORKEN TO BUILD A COMPANY THAT HAS GROWN INTO A $1.7 BILLION COMMUNICATIONS PLATFORM.

• Author: Barkin, Dan

In the lore of American business, there are the humble places where companies are born. Garages, such as the one at Steve Jobs' childhood home, or the one where Bill Hewlett and David Packard invented Silicon Valley. Some were college dorm rooms, where Mark Zuckerberg and Michael Dell launched their fortunes. To this tradition, add a walk-in closet in a Park City, Utah, duplex where a newly discharged Marine named David Morken created Bandwidth.com to bring faster internet connections to businesses in 1999. The explosion of fiber was making broadband more available, but small and medium-sized businesses weren't the focus of big telecoms. Morken built a website for companies trying to figure out how to ditch their dial-up, sending them to carriers.

Today, Bandwidth (the ".com" was dropped in 2017) has more than 700 employees--two times as many as just two years ago--and an early June stock-market value of more than $1.7 billion. With spacious offices at N.C. State University's high-tech Centennial Campus, Bandwidth little resembles the broadband broker of its infancy. It is one of the largest players in the fast-growing telecom sector known by the arcane acronym CPaaS--Communications Platform as a Service.

If you have clicked on a phone number in the Rover app to interview a dog walker, you have used a CPaaS. If you have gotten a message on your phone about a job opening from ZipRecruiter, you've used the technology. Twofactor authentication, that little code to verify that you are you, is possible because of companies like Bandwidth.

Businesses have jumped all over the technology that lets them communicate with customers instantly.

Along the way, Bandwidth also created mobile-phone company Republic Wireless, which emphasizes ultra-low monthly rates and a heavy reliance on Wi-Fi.

Unlike most CPaaS companies. Bandwidth operates its own nationwide internet-based voice and data network, built a decade ago when its business was providing more responsive and cheaper phone service for companies than the big carriers. It survived the dot-com and telecom collapses of the late '90s and early 2000s, and for most of its existence, had little access to outside capital.

But it survived because of Morken's faith--in God and himself--and his vision, tenacity and inspirational leadership, friends and colleagues say. And a few breaks that some might call luck, others might call answered prayers.

"You want to understand David Morken?" asks longtime friend and former Bandwidth President John Murdock. "He's a preacher who happens to be a businessman."

RELIGIOUS ROOTS

Morken was born in Los Angeles 50 years ago into a family of faith. His missionary grandparents barely made it out of the Indonesian island of Sumatra after Pearl Harbor. His paternal grandfather, the Rev. David Enoch Morken, accompanied a young Billy Graham during a mission to soldiers in Korea in 1952. Morken's father, Hubert, was a professor of religion and politics at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa in the 1980s, where David went to college.

David had just gained admission to Notre Dame Law School when Operation Desert Storm began in 1991. TV images from the war made an impression on Morken, who joined the Marines and attended Officer Candidate School. "I graduated [from Oral Roberts] in May," Morken recalls, " went to Quantico for 10 weeks, got out in August and a week later I'm sitting in the front row of Constitutional Law with a shaved head at Notre Dame, a second lieutenant."

As he was finishing law school, Morken encountered the technology that would shape his career and make his fortune. The internet, developed for government and academic researchers, burst into widespread public use with web browsers. Next-generation fiber-optic networks were coming into view, with almost limitless transmission capacity compared with copper wires and dial-up modems.

The light went on for Morken when he read an article by George Gilder, a conservative futurist who predicted that this fiber-driven exponential growth in bandwidth would transform the economy. Murdock, a Marine veteran of Desert Storm, was a Notre Dame classmate of Morken's and remembers that moment.

"David had started with the Wild West of reserving domain names," Murdock says. "David's like, T reserved all of these domain names, one of which is bandwidth.' I'm like, 'Bandwidth?' And he says, 'You know, there's this World Wide Web, and there's this guy Gilder ... and you gotta read this stuff.'"

While his active duty was delayed, Morken started two online ventures, a tax-filing service and a company marketing mutual funds. Just as those were gaining traction, Morken got his callup. He sold his fledgling businesses and spent the next four-and-a-half years as a prosecutor. In the summer of 1999, with three children, a fourth on the way and his time in the Marines coming to an end, Morken was turning 30 and needed a next move. His assets consisted of three months paid leave, some domain names and an idea. So he built a website, bandwidth.com.

A MILLION-DOLLAR OFFER

The business model was simple...