Livin' La Vida Boca

Wiring the Internet Coast

It's still early in the morning, but in the stretch limousine, there's fresh ice, Perrier, soda, and rows of glasses stuffed with identically shaped paper NAPkins folded with origami delicacy. This isn't just any limousine -- it's the Internet Coast limo. "We need to hurry," Jeff Kline, 41, tells his driver. He turns to me: "I know this thing is a pig, but it enables me to work and stay productive when I'm on the move. I want to tell you how this all began."

Now president and CEO of Accris Corp., a Web-development and data-storage company in Boca Raton, Kline has closely cropped hair, blue eyes, and a look of barely suppressed impatience over the rate at which the globe turns. Almost two years ago, he organized a dinner, inviting a few friends to talk about the future of South Florida. That's where the Internet Coast movement was conceived.

At the time, Kline was suffering from an acute spell of nouveau-riche aimlessness. He'd built a small fortune by founding Ameritrend Corp., a company that provided one-stop solutions to businesses for all of their hardware and it needs: computers, networking, telephone systems, copiers. He sold the business to Danka Business Systems in 1996 and became independently wealthy.

Still in his mid-thirties, he retired. He kicked back, wore sweats, became a mildly obsessed day trader on his home computer, and began chauffeuring his kids to school and soccer games. As carpooler and scorekeeper, Kline got to know his children's friends so well that when his son brought home a class picture, he had inside information on every face in every row.

"I named every single child and did a light bio on each one," he says. "My wife said, 'You have to get back to work.' Another time, we were at the Atlanta airport. I saw this road warrior with his computer and little suitcase on wheels. My wife saw the look in my eyes as I was staring at the guy. She said, 'What do you think?' I said, 'I really miss it.' "

So in June 1998, he got back into the race by starting Accris Corp., but it wasn't enough. As he focused on his own need to do something productive with the rest of his life, he realized that the world had changed in the course of only one year. New and strange things were happening all around him.

"I was stunned by what I saw," he says. "I thought, We have to brand this. I organized a dinner with Scott Adams and a few others. We went down into the wine cellar of a local restaurant where they had a private table set up for us. We hashed out what we needed to do. We came up with a phrase: We're here to enrich the soil for growth. I went home that night and went to bed. I woke up at 2 AM and started searching domain names. I sat there for two hours. I tried everything I could think of. My last effort was 'Internet Coast.' There was nothing for '.com.' Nothing for '.net.' Nothing for '.org.' So I bought them all."

At around the same time, Scott Adams, now 37, was undergoing a similar experience, having built Hiway Technologies from a meager $8,000 nest egg into one of the largest Web-hosting companies in the world. The business began almost by accident. Adams had wanted to start a simple Internet-service provider but couldn't afford it, so he offered to manage other people's Web sites. The business took off, and eventually he sold it for roughly $200 million to Verio. Like Kline, he realized that he wanted to help guide the region's growth. With the help of four Florida-based venture-capital firms, he formed Cenetec to incubate the most promising high-tech startups in the region. Adams and Kline became the point men for the entire Internet Coast movement, which seemed to crystallize around them on its own.

It was when they met Larry Pelton that things started to gel. Pelton, 55, looks the part of the distinguished corporate executive, yet his ideas over the past decade have been nothing short of revolutionary. President of the Business Development Board of Palm Beach County, he had attempted to start an Internet-based movement exactly like the Internet Coast back in the early 1990s. But it was a classic case of a good idea a little too early for its time. He commissioned the Stanford Research Institute to study the South Florida economy. The studies identified six industries with the most potential for growth. The IT/communications cluster was among the most significant.

When Pelton met with Adams and Kline, he showed them his research. What had been nothing more than a brand name for the region began to emerge into something with numbers and addresses. Something was out there growing in obscurity -- something that confirmed their intuition.

In September 1999, Adams and Kline asked M.J. Arts, president of the Greater Boca Raton Chamber of Commerce, to let them speak at the chamber's annual membership retreat. The brand name, the whole idea of an Internet Coast movement open for free membership, electrified the crowd. Adams and Kline knew that they were onto something.