When he speaks at global technology summits to capacity-filled conference halls, Fred Voccola is confidence personified, from his demeanor to his style, with rhetoric to match.
You would be too if you were at the reins of Kaseya, an IT management market leader with 10 locations in the United States and Canada – the latest branch in Red Bank – and several others in Europe, Australia and New Zealand. At the beginning of 2019 the company was valued at $1.75 billion, and that was before investors recently injected another $500 million into the mix to fuel more growth.
On a recent day at the photo studio of Danny Sanchez, the renowned Red Bank photographer shared stories with Voccola of his early days as a local boxing prospect and a trainer. Sanchez once found himself in an impromptu sparring session with future New Jersey Boxing Hall of Fame inductee John Molnar.
“I closed the gap on him and gave him a shot to the mid-section. I woke up a few minutes later with the other trainers looking down at me,” Sanchez said. “I got a couple good shots in though.”
Voccola is a fighter in his own right, and has found a passion for mixed-martial arts, a combat sport he’s made a part of his life for the last 15 years.
“I’ve actually had a handful of amateur fights, boxing and jujitsu,” Voccola said. “I love it. The fights are like a chess match. If I was good at chess, maybe I’d be a better fighter.”
Self-deprecating humor aside, Voccola is a better scrapper than he lets on.
He owes his professional success to a hard-nosed approach and a willingness to pick himself up after getting kicked to the canvas.
It’s a trait he developed early in his life, scratching and clawing for playing time on the football field at Middletown South, before coming to a crossroads as a college student at Boston College.
“Before a career in technology was even a thought, everyone told me to go to Wall Street and get rich. I thought about it for a little bit in college, but they wouldn’t have me,” Voccola said. “I started my first tech company while in college because I had to, because I couldn’t get a job on Wall Street. I wasn’t Ivy League pretty boy enough for Goldman Sachs. And thank God for that.”
Voccola then set his sights on a childhood passion for tech, one cultivated by the successes of his father, who was involved in groundbreaking innovations like EZPass and in-vehicle navigation systems.
“If you’ve lived, worked or traveled down the Shore you remember the line of toll booths at the Driscoll Bridge. They’re not there anymore because my old man’s company literally created EZPass. And it was cool to me. Forget about a career or money. The idea of creating something that could change the world was cool to me. You find what you like and you pursue it,” Voccola said.
After a stint in Silicon Valley during the ‘90s and later in New York City launching, building and IPOing and/or selling a series of small tech businesses, in 2015 Voccola took over as CEO of Kaseya – which had been founded in 2002 – with a vision to transform it into the leading company of the fastest growing industry the world had ever seen.
The growth, he said, came from a worldwide entrepreneurial spirit coupled with the development of the internet.
“Unlike 10 years ago, small businesses are better equipped to compete. Walmart can do comprehensive research and stock its shelves with Fred’s Soda Company over Coca-Cola because the product is as good if not better, and it costs 30 percent less. Tech has leveled the playing field,” Voccola said.
Voccola called the expansion of the information technology industry a revolution, and compared it to other major industrial movements of the last century, like the transfer of investible capital from 1965 to 2005 in Middle East petroleum, which followed the post-World War II development of plastic.
According to Voccola, from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s the rate of investment of Fortune 500 companies in Information Technology grew at four times the rate of global GDP growth. “Today that same trend is happening, but this time the market is seeing small and medium businesses – companies from one employee to approximately 3,000 – investing in technology at an even greater pace,” he said. That total increased to seven times the global GDP from 2010 to 2017, Voccola noted.
“We are in the gold rush,” Voccola said. “In 1849 some people got rich by striking gold, but the people who sustained were those who made the picks and shovels. That’s what we’re doing at Kaseya. We provide IT infrastructure management for SMBs (small and medium-size businesses). The IT infrastructure is what allows all the technology to work. Most small businesses are now 100 percent dependent on technology and we make it work.”
Kaseya served approximately 40,000 customers worldwide in 2018 and has more than 1,200 employees. With approximately 20 employees at his Broad Street location, Voccola said the Red Bank branch is his highest performing office, and plans are in the works to expand staffing as well as the physical footprint. The purchase of additional office space is expected to come later this year, as is a greater impact on the community he grew up in.
“We don’t just want to work in the community or with local business owners. We want to be part of the community with outreach initiatives. Right now we have a couple of guys who relocated to Red Bank. One is a volunteer firefighter in town and the other is running for the school board. This is the first company I’ve had that’s allowed me to have a meaningful presence at home.”
As for the future of the industry, Voccola said it’s in Monmouth County.
With developments at Bell Works and Fort Monmouth – two historically significant hubs of technological innovation – and Kaseya’s growing presence in Red Bank, Voccola believes the Two River area is ripe for growth.
“The history is here. The DNA is here. And talented people with open minds are here. We’re working now to bring the industry back here. And I’m super lucky to be part of it. I’m lucky the Wall Street guys were too smart for me.”
