Executive careers rise and fall faster on Internet time

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© St. Petersburg Times
published February 22, 2002

In Internet time, a year feels like a lifetime. So it comes as only a small surprise that one of the Tampa Bay area's prominent tech executives of the 1990s is moving on (yet again) to a new job and a new company.

Tony Ibarguen became the coveted No. 2 exec in 1996 at Clearwater's Tech Data Corp., a computer products distribution company that's become the area's No. 1 public company in revenues. Three years later, Ibarguen decided to leave Tech Data for a higher-profile and riskier life. He became an exec at a young Internet business-to-business investor company called Internet Capital Group in Wayne, Pa.

Talk about bad timing.

After going public in 1999, Internet Capital Group's stock briefly topped a stratospheric $200 a share in January 2000. Then it steadily fell. Thursday, the stock closed at 76 cents.

That's certainly one of the reasons Ibarguen last month left Internet Capital and jumped to another company in the same Pennsylvania town with a similar mission. Safeguard Scientifics was an early investor in Internet Capital but it has suffered its own rough sledding. From a stock price near $100 two years ago, the company's shares closed Thursday at a humble $2.75.

Ibarguen, a Harvard MBA, joined Safeguard Scientifics as managing director of business and information technology services. On Thursday, Safeguard CEO Tony Craig said Ibarguen's arrival gives a big boost of experience to the management team.

When Tech Data was looking for a president in the mid-1990s, company CEO Steve Raymund rejected all the candidates offered up by headhunters. Raymund found Ibarguen by asking trusted friends in the tech industry.

It seemed a good Florida match. Ibarguen was the younger brother by 15 years of Alberto Ibarguen, who served as publisher of the Miami Herald. Tony Ibarguen and his wife, Susan, settled into St. Petersburg's tony Snell Isle community, spending $1.27-million for (and remodeling) a 1918 house St. Pete developer C. Perry Snell built for himself. It all happened just in time for Ibarguen to move on to Internet Capital.

Just for the record, Tech Data's market capitalization (shares outstanding times share price) is hovering near a hefty $2.5-billion. Internet Capital's market cap is $219-million. And Safeguard Scientifics, with a $327-million market cap, said Thursday that it lost $63-million in the fourth quarter of 2001 and $499-million for the entire year.

Who ever said the Internet investment business was a bed of roses?

For tech venture capitalists, it's been more like a bed of nails.

It's been more than a year since we checked in on the progress of former Barnett Banks chief and prominent Florida business leader Charles Rice. Rice and son Dan had teamed up in Jacksonville to start Mayport Venture Partners, a venture capital firm fueled in part by the $100-million-plus Charles Rice received in 1998 when he sold Barnett to NationsBank (now called Bank of America).

So far, it looks like slim pickings for Rice & Son. On the Web site of Mayport Venture, the firm boasts of only two companies in which it has invested. One little-noticed company, Supertron Technologies, is a New Jersey business developing magnetic resonance-related medical devices.

The other is a legal software company in Houston called PowerBrief. Mayport's Web site includes a link to a March 2001 Houston Business Journal article noting PowerBrief raised $3-million in a private placement with investors that include big-name Texas financier Robert Bass . . . and Mayport Venture.

The Web site does not mention another story in the same publication, dated seven months later on Oct. 2, 2001, with this headline: "PowerBrief files for bankruptcy protection."

Short takes

BANKS: ALMOST HUGGABLE?: This week's quarterly survey of companies in several industries, part of the University of Michigan's American Customer Satisfaction Index, suggests the two banks dominant in Florida are -- after years of chaos, dare I say it? -- improving. The index, based on a 100-point scale of satisfaction, shows Bank of America improved from a 63 in 2000 to a 68 in 2001. That's not a great number, but it's up 7.9 percent. And Wachovia Corp. -- the new name for First Union (though the bank has not changed its named in Florida yet) -- bumped from a 66 in 2000 to 72 in the 2001 survey, a 9 percent gain. So are these banks now worthy of your unquestioning loyalty? Maybe in your next life. But at least the satisfaction index is rising. . .

TO DRILL OR NOT TO DRILL?: Here's a novel argument to save the Gulf of Mexico from oil drilling and potential spills. Just drill the heck out of national parks and Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge instead.

Such was the pitch made in Denver this month by Sen. Wayne Allard, a Colorado Republican, who was debating challenger Tom Strickland.

"If you have a spill in the ocean near Florida, aren't the consequences much more severe than if there's a spill in the Arctic, where the oil will flow out on the ice and coagulate?" Allard said.

Strickland would ban drilling in the Arctic refuge, but allow some offshore drilling. But Strickland also wants America to get 20 percent of its energy from alternative energy, such as solar and wind, by 2020. Now there's an win-win idea worthy of some real consideration. . . -- Robert Trigaux can be reached at trigaux@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8405.

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