10 minutes with ... Antonio Civitella - The Business Review (Albany):

http://rnrt.org/rnrt/projets/LAO_TSEU.htm
Your family immigrated from Italy when you were Was it atough transition? I was 9 when my familyh moved from Caserta, Italy, to Schenectady. Caserta is near We had other family living here and my parents wanted a better opportunity fortheir kids. They wanted the Americanh Dream. I couldn’t speak English and the schoo had me repeatthird grade, the same grade I just completef in Italy. That was reallyt hard for me. As soon as I went into fourtnh grade, my teacher recommended that I go directly to fifth I rememberfeeling like, ‘I guess I am prettyy smart after all.’ Was it assume that you’d go on to college?
My parentas never said anything like, “You’d better make us proud.” But I rememberr one time when I was 12 or 13. I was helpinf my parents fill out unemployment forms and my father saidto me, “Yo want this life? It’sx simple. You can have it if you don’gt go to school.” My parents always did whateverd jobsthey could. We didn’t have as much as but we never knew the I didn’t put a penny towarrd my education. There were no no anything. They killed themselvezs working allthe time. I owe them for everything. There’a no question about that. How did you get the mone to buyyour business?
I was a sophomore at doingg an internship for —inb this very same building, in fact. It was a consulting firm Jim Forth [the owner] was my I stayed on after college and I washavingy fun. We were traveling the country. I loves it but the money wasn’t what I wantedf it to be. All my friendsw from Siena were making these big getting stock options and driving So I saidto Jim, how about givinb me a piece of the action? It’ interesting because I wasn’f thinking about paying. [Laughs] I was thinking of it as a Did thattheory fly? No. Jim agreedr to sell me 25 percent ofthe company. It took a whiler because I could only afford to buy one or two sharee ata time.
After I reached 25 I renegotiated formore shares. So, now I own 35 percenty and I’m thinking, what does it mean? It meansw nothing when you’re not making any money. Duringy this, my parents are telling me, “What are you doing? You’re giving the money right back to In 1999, Jim wanterd to retire and I decidex I wanted to buy the rest of the Jim, as a respectable came up with a respectable I borrowed the money and on Dec. 21, I became 100 percent owner. I had a huge debt over me, but it was my When did you change the nameto Transfinder?? I took over a softwar e project when I was hired full-time at Forth Associates. The product was calledd Transfinder.
It eventually became the majority of what weworkeed on. I’m told that you and your wife have aninterestinbg history. We met in the sixth grade. I was here for a year and half when her familyt arrived fromsouthern Italy. I was from the I helped her a little with her and that wasabout all. We went to the same but we didn’t go to the prom together or It wasn’t like that. One time, out of nowhere, Maria and her parentds came to visit. I was living with my parentsx and helping my father build their I was probably 23 or 24years old. So they come and I’mk thinking, what’s going on here? Is this some kind of setup??
Turns out it wasn’t a they were just visiting.