Her goal: give high-tech, kids a leg up

Antoinette Rodriguez of Tampa is using what she has learned as an adult to promote the bay area as a high-tech center and build a business. And she draws from a painful childhood to help disadvantaged children.

By DAVE GUSSOW

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 11, 2000

TAMPA -- High-tech executives in the Tampa Bay area have been talking for a few years about the need to organize and network. Antoinette Rodriguez made it happen in a few months.

"I really want to get going in dot-com speed," said Rodriguez, an e-business consultant who pulled together the first meeting of the Tampa Bay Internet Forum.

The new group to promote technology business has an embryonic membership and an ambiguous agenda, but Rodriguez clearly knows where she'd like to take it. And that's making an impression among business leaders.

"She's really going to be critical to make things work," said Martin Donsky, marketing manager for the Florida Technology Practice of PricewaterhouseCoopers. Donsky, who has known Rodriguez about two years, said, "She has great energy and great initiative."

Rodriguez shares the group's broad goals to promote the bay area as a high-tech center and to raise the profile of local high-tech industry. Beyond the business benefits, though, she has her own agenda: raising money to provide computers and Internet access to disadvantaged children. It's a project that's important to Rodriguez because it's personal.

"Where I grew up," she said of her youth in a tough Brooklyn, N.Y., neighborhood, "kids didn't have the tools or supportive family" to succeed in school. On the mean streets, she said, "It was a scary thing to get to the library."

Now, she thinks she can help children and build her e-marketing business even while she's helping the Tampa Bay high-tech community make a name for itself.

Rodriguez seldom talks about her impoverished youth. "I never wanted that to be the reason someone helped me," she said. "I wanted it to be based on competence and ability."

But when she spoke last month to the Tampa Bay Internet Forum -- a woman of Puerto Rican heritage before a crowd that was virtually all white and overwhelmingly male -- she told her own story to explain why they should help equip poor kids with technology's tools.

Rodriguez has come a long way in her 34 years.

She was born in the crushingly poor Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, the second of three girls in a family on welfare.

Elementary school was no picnic.

"I got beat up all the time," she said, and she tried to become a bully to protect herself. One day, a teacher Rodriguez remembers only as Mr. Crosby stopped her from fighting. "What's your problem?" she recalls him asking. Then they talked.

The teacher went to bat for her, getting her into a gifted program and becoming her mentor for a few years. Mr. Crosby introduced Rodriguez to classical music, art, literature, even some early computers.

"He gave me confidence because he believed in me," Rodriguez said. "He wanted to show us a beautiful world out there."

School and the library became a refuge from her home life. Her mother, a heroin addict who died about 12 years ago, was seldom home. Rodriguez said her father was an alcoholic who often yelled and screamed late into the night.

"My parents felt that they had no control over their lives," she said. It only helped motivate her: "You want to get an education if you want to build a better life."

Going to the library was special to her, but she had to be home before dark because of the dangerous streets. She dreamed of having her own set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica so she could avoid the walk to the library where, more often than not, she found books with pages ripped out.

Rodriguez became the first in her family to graduate from high school. She married when she was 18 and moved to Florida. She enrolled at the University of South Florida, graduating magna cum laude in 1989 with a bachelor's degree in finance. She chose the major because she had no background in it and wanted to turn a weakness into a strength.

Her marriage ended in divorce when she was 24, but a career in medical sales was taking off. Preferred Diagnostic and Medical Services in Largo hired her away from a competitor in the early '90s so it could move into the Hillsborough County market.

The company offered home respiratory services, diagnostic ultrasound devices for doctor's offices and equipment such as walkers, canes and hospital beds for home use. Rodriguez took over the company's marketing efforts in Hillsborough, building bridges with initiatives such as luncheons for home-health nurses, said Jeff Grossman, her boss there.

"Within one year, her ambition and her innovative selling and her drive had taken us from zero to a book of business that I'm going to estimate was 25 percent of company volume," he said.

Rodriguez had started work on her MBA in total quality management at USF, a degree she received in 1997. "She was an outstanding student, one who stood out from the crowd," said one of her MBA professors, Jerry Goolsby. After class, Goolsby said, Rodriguez would ask questions about the class discussion, mainly about how to apply the lessons to her career.

"I wanted to be in something cutting edge, exciting," Rodriguez said. "Something that would change the world."

Instead of health care after her MBA, though, Rodriguez started her own company, the Prosperity Group, which tried to match start-up companies seeking funding with venture capitalists. Evaluating business plans opened her eyes to technology. Again, she was intrigued by a field in which she had no background. But she wasn't intimidated.

"After Bedford-Stuyvesant, nothing scares you," she said, laughing. "I was in the medical business, but I didn't have a medical background. I thought my learning curve was always very good."

That led to consulting and marketing for e-businesses, and the recent start-up of her new business, M4EBIZ.com. There, she will advise small and medium-size companies about online marketing, affiliate programs and database marketing.

"It's my need to create something myself that belongs to me, where I can call the shots," Rodriguez said. "I need the control over my destiny."

Rodriguez set out to create the Tampa Bay Internet Forum after attending a meeting of South Florida high-tech companies that banded together to network and promote the area.

She began calling people in the bay area, such as Donsky at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Some high-tech executives here have talked for years about organizing a group, if for nothing else than networking and getting to know each other. But it was Rodriguez who ran with the idea.

When a handful of executives got together for lunch to discuss the possibility, Donsky said, many had not even met.

"I think her timing was impeccable," said Tom Wallace, president of BrainBuzz.com, an online job site in Tampa who has known Rodriguez for a few months. Rodriguez and other organizers drafted him as president of the group, a role he accepted with this caveat:

"Our first obligation is to our shareholders. That's the balancing act," Wallace said of the frenetically busy dot-com executives. "She's making the time, energy and effort to drive it. I think it's wonderful. She gets stuff done."

Publicity after the kickoff breakfast prompted calls from companies interested in joining; details still are being worked out. The group doesn't want to get bogged down with too many meetings, dues or other minutiae. Rodriguez boasts that the group didn't spend a dime on its opening breakfast; sponsors picked up the tab.

Donsky, playing a mentor's role, said he helps Rodriguez focus her energy. "My role in the organization is to filter her, and to take her from high speed and make her kind of slow down and think through and firm up what direction" the Tampa Bay Internet Forum should go, he said.

The organization's initial goals are to network, raise the profile of the high-tech community in the area and work with economic development groups and the University of South Florida and other education groups. And for community service, the group will raise money for hardware and Internet access for disadvantaged children, just as Rodriguez insisted.

"I feel like a lot of them are silent, they can't speak for themselves," Rodriguez said. And in the 21st century, "this is their pencil and paper."

Mostly, Rodriguez looks ahead, not back. But she hasn't lost touch with everyone from her New York youth.

Rodriguez has helped her sisters financially, and is proud that her younger sister earned a high school equivalency diploma. That sister moved to a different section of Brooklyn, and Rodriguez calls her 5-year-old niece "the apple of my eye." But she has almost no contact with her father or older sister.

Once, she tried unsuccessfully to track down Mr. Crosby, her mentor in elementary school. Asked what he might say if he saw her now, Rodriguez smiled.

"I think he would be very happy with the results."

People wishing to make a donation to the Tampa Bay Internet Forum's fund to provide children with computers and Internet access can send checks, made out to the forum, to Marty Donsky, PricewaterhouseCoopers, LLP, 400 N Ashley St., Suite 2800, Tampa, FL 33602, or call (813) 223-7577. The forum's Web site address is http://www.tbif.org.

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