Livin' La Vida Boca

"Everybody was bubbling," Kline says. "It was really the birth of the Internet Coast. That's when it started coming together."

At this point, Adams knew that he and Kline faced a large obstacle. His huge battery of Web servers at Hiway was constantly butting up against the expense and the lag time involved in the back haul needed to connect South Florida users to the Internet in Herndon, Virginia. (To understand back haul, imagine sending an email from 101 Main Street to 103 Main Street in Boca Raton and having it travel all the way to Virginia and back to connect with the network and return to its destination.) With telecommunications charges for every mile of back haul, distance and sluggish bandwidth between South Florida and Virginia's network-access point (NAP) were adding cost to everything that Hiway did for its customers. Adams knew that the foundation of all future growth in South Florida depended on eliminating this back haul by building a nearby NAP.

Adams and Kline recruited Richard Paul-Hus, vice president of business development at Hypower Inc., a small construction-services firm in Fort Lauderdale that lays fiber-optic cable in the region. Deeply involved in Republican politics, Paul-Hus served on the finance committee for Governor Jeb Bush's campaign and had clout with the governor's IT task force. He helped set up a meeting with Bush and agreed to spearhead a committee devoted to getting a NAP built.

Paul-Hus was going through a sort of premature midlife crisis of his own, and he wasn't even 30. He'd been getting restless, wondering if he should scrap his career as an electrical contractor and try something new -- something involving maybe a small boat and as many swordfish as possible. Instead, he shifted his focus to laying fiber-optic cable, and suddenly, here was a movement that promised to spike demand for fiber-optic bandwidth in his market.

Like Adams and Kline, Paul-Hus, now 31, doesn't look the part of a behind-the-scenes operator. There's no razor-sharp edge underneath what he says and does. He isn't rehearsed or scripted. He walks around at a southern pace in his dusty old Dr. Martens, with the latest Green Day CD in his car, making big things happen for the entire state -- and unlike so many others, he's done it all so far without taking a penny of profit for his own company.

Paul-Hus arranged for Kline to meet with Julia Johnson, who heads up IT Florida, the governor's task force. "She just lit up," Kline says. "She started to contribute ideas. She came down to Boca, and we explained the major engines behind the growth along the Internet Coast. She agreed that the governor should have his first cyber-town meeting here, so she set up a meeting with him."

When he arrived, Bush was already fired up. It turned out that he had just read a Wall Street Journal article that morning about centers of high-tech innovation around the country. The story snubbed Florida.

"I hope you came here to talk to me about this," Bush said, holding up the paper, before Adams and Kline could even take a seat.

As it turned out, it was exactly what they wanted to discuss.

"That article couldn't have been better timed," Kline says. "As we started talking, Bush got more excited. He had 30 minutes blocked out for our meeting. His assistant kept coming in and saying that he had to move on, but Bush kept saying no. He kept jumping out of his seat and going over to the bookshelf. He was excited. We were excited. He asked us if we needed money. We told him that we just needed his support. We asked him to write to all of the major telecommunications companies and tell them that Florida is serious about building a NAP. We told him that we needed this effort to be backed by corner-office or top-level support."

"Done," Bush said. "Email me a list of whom I need to talk to."

"We sent him the phone numbers of all of the CEOs at the major telecoms," Kline says. "He legitimized the whole thing."

Almost immediately, the momentum snowballed. In February 2000, industry leaders had already convinced it Florida to do a small feasibility study on the need for a NAP with recommendations on tax incentives. In March, a meeting in Miami established a core of telecoms that would back the project and identified Orlando-based EPIK Communications Inc. -- which lays fiber-optic cable and then leases connectivity where the market in Florida promises to grow -- to do a more extensive feasibility study.

"We had a closed-door meeting with Internet Coast officers and the telecoms," says Kline. "We started talking about the benefits, the South American market, Brazilian B2B. Everybody saw the upside. A year ago, why would you have put a NAP in South Florida? It's out on the edge of the nation. Everyone was thinking national, not international. But from an international perspective, it's perfect."