The story of George Roth is the classic tale of a Romanian IT specialist who left Romania to find the "American Dream."
What is less common in his case is the fact that he did not leave during the communist regime, but afterwards and that he dreamt his own dream of starting a software business in his native town, Cluj.
Actually, it was not like a dream. He first had to gain credibility and save enough money to start up his own company.
Gaining experience at Cluj-based Territory Centre, where he worked as a fresh IT graduate, Roth decided to leave Romania in 1991.
The reason was that the technology he was working with was more advanced than domestic demand, although he was employed by a strong IT centre.
"The only trouble of the Centre was that it was created too early," Roth says.
"We dealt with technologies that were too novel as compared to the demand in Romania that time, while we could not attend international activities due to the isolation that broke us from the West."
As he arrived in the US, Roth started to perform petty works, without feeling humiliated. He worked in a gas station and then as a salesman in Los Angeles. "It was an extraordinary experience, because I understood the American mentality, which appreciates work, irrespective of its kind," Roth says.
"After ten years of IT in Cluj, I took the lowest jobs in the US, but I think it was helpful for me."
After several jobs in Los Angeles, Roth left for Phoenix, Arizona, with the help of a former friend and colleague from Cluj, Alin Popluca.
He became employed with the Fraud Prevention Centre of American Express, where he experienced both satisfaction and disappointment.
"Working with one of the largest companies in the world was an interesting experience," he says.
"I realised that such huge companies reminded me of the former communist enterprises: bureaucracy, politics, and so on."
Three months later, he moved to ESI, a company dealing with stock exchange applications for the finance-banking market.
It was the first time when he felt lucky, as the projects he was developing aimed at large corporations, such as Citicorp, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, Bank of New York, Chase Manhattan and others.
He came up with the idea of developing a new product, a "laundry," which was a system that eliminated the errors from the documents including financial information. He called it Security Universe Management System (SUMS).
"Large investment companies from the US have daily transaction volumes worth hundreds of millions of dollars and, because of a one-cent price difference, they may incur huge losses," Roth explains.
"The strategy of large companies is to buy the same data from several sources and our system checks if the information is right or wrong, thanks to some very complicate rules."
He was taught another painful lesson at ESI: when you want something, if you want to be noticed, you'd better ask for something than wait to be given that thing.
"They proposed me to become a shareholder, but when the system was ready, they broke their promise."
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