By Manny Frishberg , JTNews Correspondent
“Why a profile of me?” asked Reuven Carlyle when JTNews contacted him for this article. “My mother would wonder why it took so long for someone to ask, and my friends would wonder who I paid off.”
Anyone who knows what he has achieved and his goals for the future has no trouble understanding.
Reuven Carlyle is both a successful communications executive and a social entrepreneur — a man who has made a name for himself helping to create a company that went from a small Seattle start-up to become the largest provider of emergency wireless E911 services in the nation.
He is the kind of man who believes that big ideas, especially the ones that seem at first to be the most ludicrous, are the ones that are most worth pursuing.
As XYpoint Corporation’s vice president for strategic development, he worked out partnering relationships with the likes of Verizon Wireless, AT&T Wireless Services, Cingular, Vodafone, and US Cellular, among others. Currently he is the CEO of Washington2, a consulting firm that helps companies with Homeland Security products and programs navigate their way through the red tape of government contracting.
In addition, he has his fingers in a number of business ventures. One is a company hoping to provide nationwide real-time traffic information by tracking where cellular phones are moving — or not moving — along freeways and roads around the country. Another, Dolce Vita (Italian for “The Sweet Life”), is a Queen Anne shop serving gelato — the Italian version of ice cream, with “twice the flavor and half the fat” — which he foresees spreading throughout the nation to become “the next Starbucks.”
“I consider myself a business and social entrepreneur,” Reuven said in a sit-down interview at the JTNews office recently. “What that means is I enjoy helping companies that are exploring new ways of doing business. I like working with really smart people.
“I like working with companies that, in my own mind, have some socially redeeming value,” he added. “I’m not selling soap. On the other side, I like working with the public sector to inject a dose of entrepreneurial energy.”
He is also a part of the Seattle Monorail Project’s business development team. Having the background from his time in the cellular communications field, he is well suited to the task, which he said is “to make sure that the monorail is break-even by 2020.”
That is no small goal in the world of public transit, where most systems are considered successful if they can cover 25 percent of their operating expenses without tax subsidies.
Another of his goals for the monorail is to arrange for WiFi wireless connectivity on the trains and in the stations “so that commuters and others can have a great user experience riding the monorail.” Doing so will, he hopes, make riding the ‘rail a more attractive option to people who currently rely on their cars to get where they are going.
Community service has been a thread running through Carlyle’s life. When he was 15, he left high school in Bellingham, where he had been living since he was five, to become a Congressional page for three years. He worked for Washington’s legendary senators, Warren Magnuson and Henry “Scoop” Jackson, then for a time as a personal aide to Speaker of the House Thomas (“Tip”) O’Neill. After receiving a B.A. in communications from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, he returned here to serve in Olympia as a speechwriter and deputy press secretary in the governor’s office, before heading off to Harvard for his Master’s in Public Administration.
While working in the wireless industry, he took six months off to work with the Casey Family Foundation, trying to develop a program that would bring 18-year-olds who were “aging out” of the foster-care system into a year-long community service project. Currently he is a board member for the University of Washington Hillel program.
“Everybody that Rabbi Dan has married ultimately has to be on the board. It’s the ultimate quid pro quo,” he joked, referring to UW Hillel’s popular director, Rabbi Dan Bridge. On a more serious note he explained that “I try to help out Hillel, because when young Jewish people are in college it is that last opportunity to help them come alive spiritually before they wander off into the larger community.”
Carlyle grew up in Bellingham in the 1970s and early ‘80s, at a time when the Jewish community was, in his words, “a tiny little congregation.”
“We had a tiny little shul in which we had about one or two Bar Mitzvahs a year, if we were lucky.”
He credits his spiritual awakening to his rabbi there, Rabbi Frederick Gartner.
“He was an old German Jew who a lot of people were intimidated and afraid of, but who had a special warm place in his heart for me,” said Carlyle. “I decided late that I wanted to be Bar Mitzvah’ed, so I studied real intensely and very hard. The rabbi really took me under his wing and said that the real experience of the Bar Mitzvah was a connection to God and to the Jewish people, and to just do your best on the logistics.”
As much as he exudes an infec-tious enthusiasm for his commercial ventures, Carlyle’s true passion comes out when he begin talking about his ideas for community service.”
One of the biggest dreams of my work life,” he said, is to be a part of building an ethos and a structure of universal service for young people, based in part on the City Year model.
City Year, which has been called “one of the nation’s premiere AmeriCorps programs,” takes volunteers from ages 18 to 24 for their National Youth Corps, deploying 750 people in 14 cities around the country.
The 10-month program focuses primarily on youth education and development, with participants serving as mentors for children in partnership with public schools, organizing, and running afterschool programs on issues such as preventing domestic violence, AIDS awareness, and valuing diversity.
“I think everybody ought to take a year off and do service,” Carlyle said, whether that is in the military, internationally in the Peace Corps, or in domestic service through an agency like AmeriCorps. “Then you’ve got racial, ethnic and gender diverse people working in teams.”
By doing that, he sees young people benefiting from the experience of being thrown together and learning that being of service can provide its own rewards, as well as the communities reaping the rewards of the additional energy and efforts they put out.