>> I started my career as
an engineer and progressed
and did well in the General Electric company.
But after six years when I did get my Masters
in Business Administration
I took a change in career.
And I got into business development
and marketing.
I actually lived offshore for General Electric
both in Italy and Australia and worked there.
And opportunities just kept being presented
to me in a very technical organization.
Along the way I opened up offices in Saudi
Arabia, Caracas, Hong Kong, Singapore.
And that gave me the opportunity
to grow and progress.
I became one of the first presidents of
U.S. Sprint, the telecommunications company.
I ran the whole eastern coast for them.
I am the son of immigrants from Italy.
And I'm proud to be honored by a diverse,
urban university like Temple because I grew
up in a diverse, urban neighborhood
in west Philadelphia.
I grew up in Philadelphia.
I attended a Catholic high school.
I went to Villanova and got
my engineering degree.
I got an MSEE from Drexel
on the part of the financing
by the company I worked for, General Electric.
And then I decided that I
wanted to expand my horizons.
And I came to Temple and in four years
received my Masters of Business Administration.
It was an exciting experience for
me because I had the foundation
of a strong technical background and the
discipline of that, but the whole ideas
of finance and economics and things that
I had never thought about just opened
up a whole other dimension to
my vision in my business career.
My technical background and my curiosity
in technology has served me well.
The Internet was just really
starting in the early-90s.
And I was given the opportunity to become the
CEO of a company called Network Solutions.
And Network Solutions was the company
that created the naming system dot
com, dot org, dot edu, all the dots.
And we developed the company that
had been acquired by another company.
I became the CEO.
And we took it public in 1996.
And I remember the days when I ran
that company when there was less
than 500,000 names around the world.
Today I'd venture to guess
there's 500 million names.