Dr. Amol Sarva is an American mobile entrepreneur

Entrepreneur

An entrepreneur is an owner or manager of a business enterprise who makes money through risk and initiative.The term was originally a loanword from French and was first defined by the Irish-French economist Richard Cantillon. Entrepreneur in English is a term applied to a person who is willing to...

 and technology policy

Technology policy

The study of technology policy or engineering and policy is taught at multiple universities.Classic political science teaches technology as a black box. Similarly economics treats technology as a residual to explain otherwise inexplicable growth. The creation of the U.S...

 advocate.

Business profile

Dr. Sarva is an American entrepreneur and technology policy advocate known for founding two significant mobile service companies, Virgin Mobile USA

Virgin Mobile USA

Virgin Mobile USA, Inc. is a wireless communications services provider based in Warren, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 2001 as a mobile virtual network operator, Virgin Mobile USA, Inc. commenced operations under the Virgin Mobile brand in June, 2002...

 and Peek

Peek (mobile Internet device)

Peek Inc. is a mobile technology company headquartered in New York, NY. Its flagship product is the Peek 9, the 2010 version of its mobile Internet device that originally debuted as an email-only mobile handheld device in September 2008.- Company :...

.

At Virgin, he was one of the three earliest members of a team that created the MVNO (mobile virtual network operator

Mobile virtual network operator

A mobile virtual network operator is a company that provides mobile phone services but does not have its own licensed frequency allocation of radio spectrum, nor does it necessarily have all of the infrastructure required to provide mobile telephone service...

) concept in the US and built a public company with over $1 billion in revenue and 5 million customers. The company was among the first to aggressively market prepaid, no contract wireless services in the US, and was a joint venture

Joint venture

A joint venture is a business agreement in which parties agree to develop, for a finite time, a new entity and new assets by contributing equity. They exercise control over the enterprise and consequently share revenues, expenses and assets...

 between the UK's Virgin Group

Virgin Group

Virgin Group Limited is a British branded venture capital conglomerate organisation founded by business tycoon Richard Branson. The core business areas are travel, entertainment and lifestyle. Virgin Group's date of incorporation is listed as 1989 by Companies House, who class it as a holding...

 and the US wireless operator Sprint

Sprint Nextel

Sprint Nextel Corporation is an American telecommunications company based in Overland Park, Kansas. The company owns and operates Sprint, the third largest wireless telecommunications network in the United States, with 53.4 million customers, behind Verizon Wireless and AT&T Mobility...

.

Founder of Peek in late 2007, along with several of his former Virgin colleagues, he introduced the world's first mobile device dedicated to email

Email

Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...

 to wide critical praise. The product has evolved into a sleek and simple device that makes a wide range of real-time web services available at low cost—email, SMS

SMS

SMS is a form of text messaging communication on phones and mobile phones. The terms SMS or sms may also refer to:- Computer hardware :...

, social networking. Peek has launched services in the US, Europe, and Asia.

Public policy

Uniquely well-informed about the competitive dynamic of US mobile operators, Sarva founded the Wireless Founders Coalition For Innovation in 2007 and appeared in US Senate hearings and Federal Communications Commission

Federal Communications Commission

The Federal Communications Commission is an independent agency of the United States government, created, Congressional statute , and with the majority of its commissioners appointed by the current President. The FCC works towards six goals in the areas of broadband, competition, the spectrum, the...

 (FCC) panels on the subject of competition in US telecom.

Other activities

Sarva is active in the New York startup community, as one of the original members of the Founders' Roundtable and mentor at NYC Seed. Amol Sarva has a doctorate from Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

 in philosophy, with a dissertation on the modularity concept in cognitive science

Cognitive science

Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...

; and undergraduate degree from Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

.