The Bear Roars Bandwidth: Dave Schaeffer Part 2, Founder and CEO of Cogent Communications
Oct 9, 2025
Dave Schaeffer, Founder and CEO of Cogent Communications, shares his journey through the telecom collapse of the early 2000s. He discusses how Cogent strategically acquired distressed networks like PSI Net for bargain prices, transforming crisis into opportunity. Schaeffer explains their focused approach on high-density buildings, operational tactics to cut installation costs, and the discipline of sticking to pure network architecture. His insights on leveraging the chaos of the telecom crash reveal a unique perspective on resilience and innovation in the industry.
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Five Foundational Business Beliefs
- Cogent built a business on five core beliefs: internet dominance, commodity bandwidth, selective endpoints, lower cost-to-serve, and architecture efficiency.
- These principles drove every strategic choice and protected long-term margins against competitors.
Be Ruthless About Which Buildings You Serve
- Pick endpoints ruthlessly by ranking buildings on tenant count, size, and proximity to maximize ROI per deployment.
- Serve a small, high-density subset rather than trying to cover every commercial building to keep installation costs low.
Prewire Buildings To Slash Installation Costs
- Pre-wire targeted buildings with vertical risers and breakout boxes to cut horizontal installation costs dramatically.
- Use dark fiber to get as close to the tenant as possible and keep per-subscriber install costs low.
