About Vincent Tocco

Who is this guy?

Entrepreneur at age 11, selling posters and bubble gum in school for a profit. It was a good racket but alas the teachers disapproved and the enterprise was shutdown. The good life while it lasted, extra deserts at lunch and all the perks that went with it.

From then I focused on school work until I found robotics in high school. The school I went to actually had one of the best robotics programs in the US, we got a great deal of equipment donated from Ford Motor Company which had our little high school an amazing advantage. I then figured out how to make robots move and build stuff, while also learning how to program (more fun).

I ran a Tag BBS back in the day (if you don’t know what that is, Google it) with a modem *gasp*, so this means computers from an early age before the Internet. There was actually a time before the web, which is crazy. If I had only been a little more business oriented, I could have snapped up those valuable domain names, oh well live and learn!

After grade school I went to college and graduated with a Computer Science degree, Math and Finance minors. I worked on campus which was a great experience. I learned everything I could about networking and servers. Administered Unix and Linux boxes for all services like campus mail, web, file, spam, database, you name it. These varied from Sun Solaris boxes with eight CPU’s to Dell 2U servers.

One of my main jobs was to work on the campus network, which we migrated to an entire Cisco infrastructure with Catalyst 6513’s at the core and smaller switches at the buildings. Another large task was to create a monitoring infrastructure, we did this by creating scripts and tools. I picked up a great deal of experience, so decided get my CCNA and CCNP. After installing a bunch of other gear including firewalls, routers, content switches, access points, etc, I decided it was time to get some global experience at a larger enterprise.

While at Ford Motor I was able to get my CCIE certification (#15507) by studying like mad and dedicating myself to it (a common pattern in my life). I passed on the first attempt which is very unlikely from what I am told. With my certification in hand, I asked for a raise but they couldn’t make it happen. Too large of a company and not enough time in (three years, but stuck in the day where time meant more than ability). So I moved to a smaller Cisco partner called Netarx.

At Netarx I was in charge of project design and deployment for companies all over the world. I was able to travel quite a bit, including Dubai for a week to setup a partnership with a company there. Learned a great deal about IP Telephony and how small businesses operate with Netarx. Started a few e-commerce businesses on the side, but nothing took off (portable solar chargers was one of them). In 2008 they wanted to open a Phoenix office and I jumped at the chance to move out west.

I worked in the Phoenix office for a bit and felt something was missing in my life (another common theme). This was the point I decided there is a need to move back into the business world and do something on my own, full time. It was a very tough decision walking away from a high paying stable environment, but it had to be done.

With some savings in the bank and a desire to buck the trend, I left and figured out what I had to do next. Hint: Real Estate, Virtual Receptionist Service where I learned a ton about marketing, and many programming ventures/creations, blogs, etc.

Check out what I am up to now on this page: NOW