He founded the non-profit National Service League, which sought to aid the transition to democracy in Eastern Europe, and ran it from 1990 to 1994.
On that daily bicycle ride, he passed Reagan National Airport, where there were plenty of private planes sitting unused.
[5] Andrew Warner of Mixergy has described Cornwell as “a guy who could barely afford the price of a FedEx envelope to ship out his business plan to investors” but who managed nonetheless to build “a hit charter jet company”, namely Skyjet.
[7][8] Cornwell was deputy political director of the U.S. Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee under the chairmanship of John F. Kerry .
[2] Asked by Crains to recount a business mistake he had made and learned from, Cornwell recalled his founding of Central Europe Today “right after the Berlin Wall came down,” when “phone lines from Budapest to London were routed through somewhere else.” The problem was that the broadcast was routed through different European cities on different days, with no rhyme or reason, “so we had to be there every step of the way to wake up the operator in whatever country – but that was difficult because we never knew beforehand what country it would be....We had all the big things right, but this small little detail at the core of what we were doing was broken and so everything else broke as a result.” He learned from this experience that “you have to own, obsess and be paranoid about every single step.”[9]