Tired of watching other people make money from his ideas, he left Forrester to start New Oak Communications, a pioneering vendor of virtual private networking (VPN) switches that was acquired in 1998 by Bay Networks (now Nortel Networks), to create the Contivity Extranet Switch product family.

Leaving Nortel, he took some time off and started Brix Networks in July 1999. Today, Pincince is still at Brix, and the company is a growing and widely acknowledged global leader in providing solutions that allow carriers, service providers, cable companies, and large enterprises to guarantee the successful launch and ongoing, profitable operation of various IP-based services, including voice (VoIP), video (IPTV, VoD), and data (Internet).

Pincince is a member of the Massachusetts Network Communications Council’s Board of Directors, the Museum of Science Boston’s Board of Directors, and he was selected as a finalist for Ernst & Young’s 2003 New England Entrepreneur of the Year Award. He is married and has a daughter and a son.

Mohney: I’ve always heard stories about people bluffing their way into jobs as programmers without any previous experience, but you actually did it! And working in C at Kurzweil Technologies no less! How did you manage that feat?

Pincince: My undergraduate work in neuroscience at Brown University led me to MIT’s graduate program in brain and cognitive science, where I studied Alzheimer’s disease and other memory disorders. Although I found this work to be quite interesting, from a career perspective I could see that my studies would lead me down the path toward being a college professor, and I wasn’t quite sure if that was what I really wanted to do. That’s when I started to take a keener interest in the Macintosh computer I taught myself how to use as a research tool and also started dabbling in the Pascal programming language.

After completing graduate work at MIT, I interviewed with voice-technology pioneer Kurzweil Technologies. My soon-to-be bosses were somehow under the impression I could write C-code−I’m not really sure why [winks]. Even though I had zero experience in this area, I landed a job porting the company’s Sun-based optical character-reading software to a Mac. But I taught myself C-code at night and learned just enough, fast enough, to get the job done.

Kurzweil, which was owned by Xerox, turned out to be an education for me in more than C-code–it was also my first exposure to the natural tension that exists between the entrepreneurial and the corporate worlds. And it convinced me that I was much better suited for an entrepreneurial-type work existence versus being part of a hulking corporate entity.

Mohney: What was your thinking in jumping from an analyst at Forrester Research to starting up New Oak Communications? Would you go back?

Pincince: As an analyst, I learned to constantly think ahead and focus on the “micro”–things you can change–and be aware that you can’t change the “macro,” which is to say a whole market or industry, at once. At Forrester, I researched and wrote reports on networking and the Internet in the mid-’90s when the World Wide Web was still very much in its infancy and prior to its widespread adoption and use as the indispensable daily tool it has become for all of us.

After seeing several of my reports incorporated into business plans for successful start-up companies, I decided to satisfy my own strong entrepreneurial leanings and started New Oak Communications, one of the first companies to develop VPN switching technology that allows the public Internet to behave like a private network.

Bay Networks purchased New Oak in 1998, and then Nortel Networks subsequently acquired Bay a few months later. I remained at Nortel for a while, and then decided to take some time off.

As much as I enjoyed my time as an analyst, for me there’s really nothing like the challenge, rush, and satisfaction of starting and building a company, leading a strong, talented team, and delivering solutions to customers that solve their problems.

Mohney: Thinking about the start-up space in 2008–where would you want to start up a high-tech company today, Boston or Silicon Valley? Do you think the reputation of Silicon Valley is overstated when you look at Boston or other high-tech areas?

Pincince: I see that decades-old “Silicon Valley or Route 128”

 

I learned to constantly think ahead and focus on the “micro”–things you can change–and be aware that you can’t change the “macro”...a whole market or industry, at once.