Livin' La Vida Boca

The Boca Raton Boosters Club

Richard Ford lives in a single-story house with a swimming pool in a gated community that is only five minutes from his office by car. Dark-haired, youthful, and confident with a PhD in physics from Oxford University, Ford sits at the kitchen table with his wife, Sarah Gordon, a top authority on the psychology of people who write and unleash computer viruses. She's blue-eyed, red-haired, and fair-skinned, and her name calls up pages of hits on a Google.com search.

These two technological geniuses are informal Boca boosters. And it isn't a casual choice. They've given up a lot of money to live here. Gordon works as a senior research fellow at Symantec Corp. Ford works at Cenetec helping the accelerator pick the best applications from entrepreneurial, high-tech startups. They're here for life.

"Quality of life is king for us," says Ford, 32. "I came here from New York. I had an awesome job at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, but I wanted to move to South Florida. This is a great area. There are a lot of jobs, a lot of opportunities, a lot of startups. People shooting for something big. The work ethic is good but not ridiculous. There's no one sleeping under a desk. A lot of folks who want to make money and have a quality of life live here. When I first came here a little over two years ago, all of the recruiters said that there was nothing going on. There are a ton of recruiters here now. Things have reached a critical mass. There are some absolutely top people in South Florida."

"There's an incredible amount of Internet access here," Gordon adds. "What more could you want?"

The conversation turns into a South Florida love fest -- an alternating round of praise about affordable housing, good schools, easy access to bandwidth, the nightlife in Miami, the inexpensive air-fares, and the availability of all major sports within an hour's drive.

"The beach is gorgeous," Gordon says. "I love the summers."

"You get a three-bedroom in a gated community for $180,000," Ford says. "We live slow but work fast. Why be an entrepreneur in the Valley? You burn your money in a quarter of the time. You compete for too few people. Real estate is incredibly expensive. The talent pool is here -- if you can find it. It's a matter of being around, having good connections. It's networky."

"I get offers all the time," Gordon says. "I was offered a more than million-dollar signing bonus to leave Symantec. That's a lot of money. I work at the Symantec research lab. I create testing criteria and methodologies for antiviruses. I discovered the first Word macrovirus and the first Excel macrovirus. I'm happy doing what I'm doing."

"I get to work in a thrilling environment, not a breakneck environment," Ford says. "I get stretched, but I don't get broken."

"This is the happiest I've ever seen you," Gordon says. "Life here is as slow or as fast as you want it to be."

Will It All Happen in Time?

But there is a cloud drifting across the clear Florida sky: Will money and manpower arrive in time to fuel growth now that the opportunity is at its greatest? Jeff Bonar may represent the region's future, but Brett Cramer personifies the emerging crisis -- a countervailing set of issues that could prevent much of that future from happening.

Cramer is president of TvTaxi.com Inc., a small company whose software allows companies to brand their streaming-media assets. The company is headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, around the corner from Citrix and next door to Microsoft's Latin American headquarters. He knows that he has a valuable product. His software does everything that RealPlayer does -- without all of the branding clutter. The problem: Time is running out for him to find seed money in Florida.

"I've been in computers for more than 15 years," says Cramer, 36. "I started in my teens. I bought one of the first modems ever made: a Hayes 1200. This was around 1980, when I was in high school. The Web didn't exist yet. Nobody knew that there was such a thing as the Internet. It was fun back then. With the bandwidth challenge and wireless, it's back to being fun again. I've been incorporated for 16 years. I know how to make money."

Cramer paces back and forth in a two-color conference room -- a space that's decorated with a lot of black accented with a sort of ectoplasm green -- with a huge video monitor wired to a keyboard and a mouse on the conference-room table. He has a goatee, short black hair, and wire-rim glasses. In the conference room, there's a whiteboard that Cramer plans to replace with a glass one because he just can't get this one clean enough. The main room beyond the conference-room door is a jumble of equipment and a couple of workstations where young engineers do their jobs while listening to rapper Eminem.