Entrepreneur’s gambles pay off

Entrepreneurs start companies for many reasons. Some dream of making it big, like Bill Gates or Sam Walton.
Others simply want to become their own boss. Still others believe they have an idea so tantalizing that if they don’t take that idea and run with
it, someone else will.

By Carlotta Mast
Daily Camera

For longtime Boulder entrepreneur Juan Rodriguez, family stands out as the reason he
started his second company, Exabyte Corp., a storage technology firm that, at one point,
was one of the most successful high-tech companies in the country.
The year was 1985, and Rodriguez had recently left Storage Technology Corp., another
legendary computer storage company Rodriguez co-founded in 1969.
"I figured I only had two choices: move someplace else to have an equivalent job —
because there wasn’t any place like (StorageTek) in the area — or stay here and start
another company," Rodriguez said.
Rodriguez, who in 1994 was named Entrepreneur of the Decade by the Boulder Chamber
of Commerce’s Development Commission, has started a number of companies, including
StorageTek, Exabyte and Ecrix Corp., yet another storage technology firm that merged with
Exabyte in November 2001. Each of these organizations has brought new jobs, new
technology and new entrepreneurs to the area.
"He is not directly in the economic development business, but he is indirectly one of the
biggest economic developers we have had in this area — ever," says G. Dale Meyer, the Ted
G. Anderson Professor of Entrepreneurial Development at the University of Colorado’s Leeds
School of Business.
Data storage has become synonymous with Boulder in large part because of
Rodriguez and his itch to do things his own way.
In 1963, Rodriguez graduated from New York University with a master’s degree in
electrical engineering and joined IBM in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
When IBM moved Rodriguez to Boulder three years later, he anticipated it was
just the first in a long line of moves with IBM.
So he joined forces with fellow IBMers Jesse Aweida, Tom Kavanaugh and Zoltan
Herger to form StorageTek, a company that would free the founders from the
bureaucratic shackles of Big Blue while allowing them to compete with the behemoth
computer organization on the tape storage front.
Although it wasn’t a common thing to do at the time, Rodriguez didn’t think twice
about leaving the security of corporate life to go it alone.
"I was all of 28 years old, and I was going to be in charge of my area —
something that I couldn’t have hoped for at IBM for another 10 years," Rodriguez says.
"I was interested in doing things my own way instead of everyone else’s way."
More often than not, the Rodriguez way has proved to be the right way.
Since its inception in 1969, Louisville-based StorageTek, which posted $2.05
billion in revenue in 2001, has become a leader in the data storage industry and the
third largest employer in Boulder and Broomfield counties, behind IBM and Sun
Microsystems. The company employs 2,735 people.
StorageTek filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 1984 and began whittling its local employee base of 8,000 people to fewer than
4,000 workers. Rodriguez left the company in early 1985.
Despite the turmoil, the legacy and the contributions of both StorageTek and its co-founder are undeniable.
"When you look at the genealogy of so many, many companies in this region, that StorageTek trunk is huge," Meyer says. "We’re not
just talking about companies that (Rodriguez) has started. We’re talking about all of those many other companies that have been spawned
from
StorageTek."
Along with the desire to keep his family in Boulder, a visionary idea for moving the tape storage industry ahead by what at the time was a
quantum leap spurred Rodriguez to start Exabyte with Kelly Beavers and Harry Hinz in 1985.
"There was a lot of paranoia because we were still working at StorageTek," says Beavers, who is Exabyte’s vice president of marketing.
"We couldn’t just put an ad in the paper advertising for a CEO."
Hinz and Beavers decided to approach Rodriguez. He came on board, helped finalize the business plan and attract financial backers, and
Exabyte was born.
As Exabyte’s first financial backer sees it, Rodriguez and many of his products have been successful because of the entrepreneur’s ability
to predict what the marketplace is going to need long before it actually needs it.
"He is able to do that better than any engineer I have ever known," says John Hill, partner in the venture capital firm Hill, Carman Ventures.
A desire to devote his attention to outside interests, including teaching and officiating soccer games, prompted Rodriguez to leave
Exabyte.
From there Rodriguez founded a handful of new companies, including SweetWater Inc., which produces portable water purifiers, and two
other data storage companies, Datasonix and Ecrix.

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