 
|
|||||||||
              
|
Executive in the Spotlight: Marcus Ruscitto Internet moves too fast for Stargate's 29-year-old CEO to slow down Monday, February 16, 1998 By Michael Newman, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Ever since Stargate Industries purchased USA Onramp last month, Marcus Ruscitto has not had a life. Not that he had one to begin with.
"I work all the time," says the 29-year-old president and chief executive officer of Stargate. "If I'm not working, I'm sleeping."
Of course, he does manage to fit a few other activities in his schedule, such as eating. But the Internet is famously hectic, and Ruscitto's life mirrors his business.
Since starting Stargate with his younger brother three and a half years ago, he has taught himself about technology and networking, often paying attendance fees at industry seminars from his own pocket. His background is in finance.
After graduating from Miami University of Ohio in 1990, he had several jobs in which he put his financial background to good use: He managed investment portfolios and helped people and companies develop benefit and estate plans.
In fact, Ruscitto was planning to attend business school in the fall of 1994 when fate, also known as the Internet, intervened.
Ruscitto learned about the Internet through his younger brother Michael, then 15 and now a student at Carnegie Mellon University. Marcus didn't know much about the Internet, he says, until his brother introduced him to it.
His brother wanted to connect to the Internet but found his options for doing so were limited. So he talked to Marcus and they decided to get together with some friends and buy some equipment so they could connect on their own.
"Then we said, 'Why stop there?' " Ruscitto says. "We decided to continue to build it. We did a little bit of advertising, and found that we couldn't keep up with it all."
This was back in the days, Ruscitto recalls, when he clipped out all the articles he could find about the Internet and kept them in a single manila folder. Today, of course, such a file would take up an entire wing of a library.
As the Internet has grown, so has Stargate. With its purchase of USA Onramp, Stargate now has some 18,000 customers, 1,000 of them commercial. Revenues were $5 million last year, a number Ruscitto hopes will double by the end of this year.
The company has 52 employees, the majority of whom work in technical support. Ruscitto says Stargate can offer the same content as larger rivals such as MCI or AT&T - namely, the World Wide Web - but better customer service.
Discussing the future of the Web, Ruscitto sounds like he's speaking another language. "I envision ISPs and CLECs eventually becoming indistinguishable," he says, before launching into a short tirade against the RBOCs.
To translate: Internet Service Providers, such as Stargate or Telerama, provide customers with a way to connect to the Internet. In Ruscitto's view, they are becoming more like Competitive Local Exchange Carriers, such as Worldcom, which offer local phone service.
Both ISPs and CLECs carry traffic across the local networks of the Regional Bell Operating Companies. For now, CLECs carry voice and data traffic, while ISPs carry only data. Increasingly, however, both will carry data.
And both have to deal with the slow-moving, often maddening, formerly monopolistic bureaucracy of the regional phone companies. "Let me tell you, they do not make it easy," Ruscitto says.
Since Stargate's purchase of USA Onramp Jan. 21, Ruscitto has been "focusing on getting these two organizations walking in the same direction," he says. "Some things they did better than we did, and vice versa. We're trying to sort through all that and make the changes."
USA Onramp's customers were mostly residential, as are most of Stargate's. But Ruscitto says the company plans to focus on the more lucrative commercial side of the business.
Since January, Ruscitto has been dividing his time between Stargate's Belle Vernon headquarters and USA Onramp's Gateway Center offices. Since he lives in Shaler, he spends more than his share of time on the road.
"I don't have any hobbies," he says. "I have only memories of hobbies."
Executive in the Spotlight: Marcus Ruscitto
Age: 29
Education: Peters Township High School, 1986; bachelor of science degree in finance, Miami University of Ohio, 1990.
Career path: Portfolio manager at A.G. Edwards & Sons; vice president at Pittsburgh Financial Services and a benefits-and-estate planner at the CM Financial Group; started Stargate Industries in November 1994.
|
||||||||
