To grasp the simulation software Jesse Liu and AccuSoft prepare for the military, think video games and think big -- as in 10,000 ships, soldiers, tanks and aircraft on a virtual battlefield. Just don't push the analogy too hard. It's serious, expensive stuff to the Army.
Liu, a Taiwan native, now a naturalized citizen, founded the Orlando company in 1992 after he got "kind of, in a way" forced out of his previous software venture by partners who, he says, had more interest in quick riches than technology. (One of those partners, Glen Lang, now working in venture capital and serving as mayor of hot Raleigh, N.C., suburb Cary, says Liu is "brilliant. One of the five smartest guys I ever met.")
At AccuSoft, Liu's in control and pursuing his love -- writing software. AccuSoft only generates about $2 million a year in revenues, but it has a reputation for cutting-edge work. Now Liu, 42, wants to hire a marketing executive and triple revenues. He keeps family close. His brother Wentao is vice president. His wife, Lana, is chief financial officer.
Liu, an electrical engineer by training, learned high-end simulation in the 1980s at General Electric's Daytona Beach facility. He moved to Orlando as a Sun Microsystems consultant and made the simulation industry mecca his base.
His 20-employee firm has written graphics software for helicopter, tank, weapon and battlefield simulators as well as for a U.S. Marine Corps electronic classroom. The military's interest in creative software solutions appeals to him, as does helping his adopted nation. "When people say this is the land of opportunity," he says, "I can say that out loud."
Net Ventures: Partners in Change
Investors wedded to wife-and-husband team Laurie Silvers' and Mitchell Rubenstein's Big Entertainment certainly know the value of not staying married to a concept. Launched in 1993 as a publisher of comic books -- a lucrative fad then -- Big E later embraced mall retailing and then jumped into e-commerce. Last year came its latest shift. It bought the hollywood.com website from otherwise-occupied owner Times Mirror, scored a $105-million investment from CBS Corp. and was off on an Internet honeymoon as the newly named Hollywood.com Inc. A stock that bottomed at $2 in 1998 rode an Internet boost to $34. "We have obviously changed course," Silvers says.
Changing plans comes easy to Silvers, 47, and Rubenstein, 45. Lawyers by education -- they had a Boca Raton practice from 1981 to 1989 -- they found early riches in owning local cable systems. In 1989, they began building what became the Sci Fi cable channel. Just as they were about to launch three years later, they sold the enterprise for an undisclosed sum to USA Network. Silvers sees the lack of a business school background as an asset. It freed a "robust appetite for trying new adventures," she says.
New adventure Hollywood.com supplies movie listing information to the likes of Yahoo, Excite, Go and Moviephone. The Boca Raton company's website features trailers, reviews, audio clips and celebrity gossip. Last month, the company launched musicsite.com. This year, it will debut Broadway.com and, in a joint venture with AMC Entertainment, online sales through MovieTickets.com. Silvers wants the company to go global and local: Global with sites such as br.hollywood.com in Brazil, and local with EventSource, an onsite listing of such local happenings as museum exhibits and the times for open-mike night at the local bar.
Space Flights: Keeping the Shuttle on Track
Ten years ago, Marcelite "Marcie" Harris attended her first shuttle launch while visiting her daughter, Tenecia, at Space Camp. Attending is one thing, seeing is another. "I missed it. I'm running around, saying, 'Where? Where?' "
She's had more auspicious firsts. The first African-American woman two-star general, she became in September the first Florida site director and first logistics process director for United Space Alliance, the Lockheed-Martin and Boeing Co. joint venture that serves as NASA's prime contractor for the shuttle -- from launch to astronaut training. It employs 6,000 in Florida. Harris is based at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral.
The 57-year-old retired major general works to improve safety and efficiency -- not only to please NASA, but with an eye toward getting new customers for the alliance's services. She also acts as liaison to the community. She judges success first by whether missions get completed successfully and safely. Success also includes making the shuttle less expensive to operate and shortening the time between launches. "I would like people to do the best job," she says, "and also have fun at it."
A native of Houston, Harris got her first bachelor's in speech and drama at Spellman College in Atlanta. (A bachelor's in business management from the University of Maryland came years later.) She joined the Air Force in 1965 and was stationed in Thailand during the Vietnam War. Years later, while assigned to command a squadron of cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy, a friend suggested she talk over a problem with then-Maj. Maurice Harris. They fell in love and married. "I guess he solved the problem," she says.
She retired in 1997 and jumped at the chance to continue in the aerospace business: "It's a world I know and I love, and it's exciting." While she misses military customs and instantly knowing people's capabilities by knowing their ranks, Harris says, "leadership skills are leadership skills, wherever you apply them." One other change from Air Force life: She now watches shuttle launches from the control center.
Web Hardware: An Internet Plumber
Charles W. "Chaz" Fritz says he has a great piece of "plumbing." The 43-year-old founder of Fort Myers' NeoMedia Technologies Inc., Fritz champions the company's patented switch that can quickly link readers to Internet sites and take cell and Palm Pilot users to websites. In Internet talk, that makes it plumbing -- infrastructure that makes the Internet go.
The NeoMedia switch, for example, allows a consumer to type a few numbers from a magazine advertisement and zip right to the purchase screen on a website. It also allows a cell phone user to type an eight-number code to link to a website, instead of hitting the numeric keypad 45 times to spell out a long address.
But rolling it out takes money. A stock price that only recently showed buoyancy -- NeoMedia went public in 1996 -- rules out a secondary offering. Chairman and CEO Fritz, making the rounds in New York one day, Switzerland another, raised $15 million in the last year. The cash infusion may move company auditors to reverse their "ongoing concern" warning from 1998, when $22 million in losses jeopardized the 100-employee company.
Internet heads talk of space -- "owning the space," the "first in the space." Fritz in the last year got a lesson in the space restrictions of being publicly held. "The hardest thing in the public space is telling people what exactly we have and the value of what it will be."
Charles W. Fritz
NeoMedia Technologies
Fritz played basketball at the University of Florida under John Lotz in the late 1970s.
- "My claim to fame was I was the only guy who couldn't dunk."
- On the other hand, he made the All-Academic SEC team, got a bachelor's in finance from UF and an MBA from Rollins College.
- Company Founded: In 1990 in Chicago, moved to Florida 1995.
- Company websites: PaperClick.com and PaperClick.com/togo.
- Quote: "One of the things we're into is ubiquity."
- Previous stops: Account executive for
IBM Corp., marketing director for the
Information Consulting Group and consultant for McKinsey & Co.
From Father to Son: Lessons from Dad ...
... On Picking Career Path
Karl Grass made the mistake of asking his father during the recession of the '70s how he knew what field to go into. "I'm 45, and I still don't know," his father told him. Grass, 43, betrays no such uncertainty. As partner in charge of the corporate software tax unit at Big Five accounting firm Arthur Andersen, Grass says his Sarasota unit is at the "forefront of changing the dynamics of how tax consultants work."
To pitch consulting services now, a tax consultant needs to know a good deal about a company's business in advance and also needs a relationship with a company insider. Grass envisions a day when the company's database mining will allow it to fire off e-mails whenever it discovers a money-saving idea to all 1,000 companies licensing Arthur Andersen software.
Grass took over the 175-employee unit, part of the company's 800-employee Sarasota technology campus, in 1994. The unit's revenues have increased 20% annually and last year reached $22 million.
The founding chairman of the Suncoast Technology Alliance, an industry group, Grass came of age in upstate New York and got his bachelor's degree in accounting from Duke University. He started his accounting career with what is now PricewaterhouseCoopers ("tax technology is a very incestuous industry") and learned software at Dallas-based tax software company Computer Language Research.
Though he moved into software, Grass still holds a CPA. But, he says, "I can't tell you the last time I prepared a return." Arthur Andersen does his taxes.
... On Starting Small
Growing up in the central Illinois town of Carlinville (pop. 5,000), Gary Monetti got this advice from his father: Start your own business or join a small company where you can make a mark. Good advice. Monetti became the first college graduate hired by 20-employee Sawtek Inc. Today, the Apopka company has 650 employees and $100 million in revenues. Its CEO: Monetti.
Sawtek makes devices for cellular phones based on surface acoustic wave technology (the "saw" in Sawtek). The largest domestic manufacturer, Sawtek supplies Motorola, Ericsson and Nokia. The stock, $6.50 a share in a 1996 initial public offering, reached $80 recently. Founders Steven P. Miller and Neal Jay Tolar stepped down last year, opening the way for 18-year employee Monetti to take over.
Monetti discovered the value of saw filters while running a satellite dish-building business as an electrical engineering major at the University of Illinois. He signed on as a Sawtek engineer and went into sales, product design and management. Monetti wants to lead Sawtek into the 75% of the saw technology market it isn't in now. Sawtek will take on major competition, but if it works, it will have a greater diversity of customers and products along with greater revenues and profits. Investors bet on success. Sawtek has a reputation for being "extremely well-run," says New Jersey stock analyst Daniel C. Koontz.
For fun, Monetti recently restored a 1967 Jaguar XKE. Fixing cars was another thing he learned from his father -- proprietor of the North End Garage in Carlinville.