Citizen of the World

In 1983, Wolf Ruzicka celebrated his fourteenth birthday in a very different way than he had celebrated his thirteenth the year before. To expand his mental horizons, his father had sent him to a school in Peru, and though he was staying with a well-to-do host family, the terrorism rampant throughout the country at the time crept into everyday life.

The most profound of these occasions came one day when Wolf and the family were driven to see an American movie. He will never forget the moment he stepped out of the car, and right onto a dead body riddled with bullet holes. “It was a wrenching shock, gearing up to be transported to a Hollywood environment and then coming face to face with that violent reality,” he remembers today. “From that moment onward, when anyone asked me at any given time how I was, I always said that I had no problems. No matter how hard my life becomes, I’ll always have enough money to fill my fridge and put gas in my car. I’ll always have a job and health insurance. That was such a defining and grounding moment for me that has kept me calm throughout my life, even in times of crisis.”

That’s why, when Wolf celebrated his birthday several weeks later, he knew he would never be the same. He had left his home country of Germany as a boy who hated that his father had sent him away to Peru, but later returned to the Frankfurt airport as the most thankful son, and as a young man eager to see more of the world. At his first opportunity, he spent half a year in Morocco and then signed himself up to attend schools in Australia, France, and Great Britain.

In a way, Wolf was pursuing a feeling he had seen in his father when the wall came down in Germany. His father had immigrated from Prague into West Germany years ago, where he met Wolf’s mother. He had continued running Westward across the Atlantic, only to arrive in Chile and Ecuador, and realize he was in love with the woman he had left in Germany. Soon after, Wolf was born.

The first chance he had after the wall came down, his father put Wolf in the car, and the two drove the autobahn until they reached the hills surrounding Prague. “Once we saw the golden rooftops of my father’s hometown, I looked over at him,” Wolf recalls. “His sleeves were rolled up, and he had goose bumps on his arms. I realized that he hadn’t been there in more than twenty years, yet he belonged there. And I realized that everyone needs to have a place of belonging; otherwise, you’re a lost soul in a big world.”

Wolf has lived his life traveling the world to find that perfect place of belonging, only to discover key pieces of himself each year and at each stop along the way. “I am a citizen of the world,” he affirms. “But I’m a capitalist at heart, and the United States is where I’m supposed to be.” Now the CEO of EastBanc Technologies, a bleeding edge software development company that builds game-changing products for large organizations, Wolf’s search for that innate belonging has led him to where he is today, leading a company he plans to dedicate the rest of his professional life to.

The streets of Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood are so idyllic and charming that one would hardly peg them as the scene of some of the world’s most vanguard software development initiatives. Yet behind the understated façade of its offices, EastBanc Technologies’ team of 150 top-notch employees are hard at work building products that transform lives worldwide in ways at once simple and elegant.

Each time a gas tank is filled, there’s a good chance that the fuel was analyzed with solutions built by EastBanc Technologies for some of the largest oil companies in the world. The International Monetary Fund recently won a design award for a highly sophisticated yet user-friendly mission-critical system that Wolf and his team refined, modernized, and mobilized. They’ve produced key software components for clients like Microsoft and Comcast, utilized by millions of users worldwide each day. “We are the secret behind some cutting-edge technologies put out by some very well-known companies that may have changed your life one way or another,” Wolf says. “That’s why I wake up with a smile every morning and feel so proud of the things we do.”

EastBanc Technologies was founded in 2000 by Anthony Lanier, a real estate developer, and Stanislav (Slava) Arseniev. From astrophysics, to rocket science, to mathematics, Slava had seen the great scientific talent in his home country and had the idea to bring some of the best and brightest here to the U.S. to see what would happen. “And what happened was magical,” Wolf affirms. “Without any nurturing, purely through happenstance and through the value of their work, the company grew to 35 employees.”

At that point, the founders were interested in assessing the real potential of the fledgling company, so they got in touch with Wolf, because of his renowned work ethic and unparalleled commitment to success. Wolf, who was living in New York City at the time, made the trip to Washington to analyze the company and give his recommendations. “I didn’t have an agenda to become CEO, as I was too young at the time,” he laughs. “But as soon as I returned to New York, they called and asked if I wanted to run the company. I didn’t even have to think about my answer—of course it was yes.”

Since Wolf came onboard in 2007, the company has grown because of its uncompromising commitment to the quality of the team members it hires. Thanks to their highly selective hiring process, their chief concern becomes keeping those employees engaged and happy, which results in an employee turnover rate of virtually zero. And thanks to the resulting enthusiasm of their work force, EastBanc Technologies has never had to invest resources in any kind of marketing or sales effort. “Our customers talk about us in their inner circles, to the point that I was cold-called by a major stock exchange when one of their IT systems malfunctioned,” Wolf remarks. “They had heard about our little swat team through word of mouth. It all boils down to reputation.”

But how did a young boy born in Nuremberg and raised in Ingolstadt, Germany, come to sit at the helm of EastBanc Technologies? “Along the way, life throws you some very strange curveballs,” he remarks. “You can either let them go sailing by you, or you can reach out and catch them. It’s the ones I decided to catch that led me to where I am today.”

Wolf’s parents had been raised in relatively wealthy families, but when communism swept over Europe, their assets disappeared completely. As a young boy, Wolf would fill buckets with coal in the basement of their apartment building and then climb five stories so they could have hot water for bathing. Thanks to the unrelenting entrepreneurial spirit of his mother and father, however, the Ruzicka family fought their way back from poverty to a modest lifestyle. His mother ran a delicatessen with hundreds of different cheeses, while his father was an air conditioning, sanitation, and heating systems engineer. He had a number of opportunities to grow his business over the years, but having had and lost so much in the past, his top priority was spending time with his son, giving Wolf the unconventional childhood that cultivated such strength and soundness of character.

His grandfather, by turns an archaeologist, artist, racing team owner, and factory owner, taught Wolf to focus on the things that most interested him. Those interests spanned math, geography, and English, bleeding into different cultures and countries as well, so the young boy began reading scientific and educational magazines and materials much earlier than his peers. As a result, he excelled in school without trying. “For a period of about three months one year, my father would knock on my door each morning and ask if I wanted to go to school that day,” he recalls. “If I wanted to go to the swimming pool instead, he’d simply write me an excuse note. I’d show up to school to take tests, and I’d get great grades. This unbelievable laissez-faire fathering allowed me to discover my true self. I flourished.”

The town of 20,000 people where he grew up had 10,000 American soldiers stationed in barracks on a hill he could see from his bedroom window, but Wolf never understood what they were doing there. When he was ten, he began playing basketball, and since most of his European peers played soccer, he would play with the Americans on the courts nearby. He learned English by counting baskets and free throws, growing especially close with a 17-year-old soldier named Kevin. It wasn’t until Kevin showed him a piece of paper he kept in his uniform, detailing the estimated number of nuclear warheads pointed at their small town at that moment, that Wolf understood the tenuous severity of the Cold War he was growing up in. “When it dawned on me that I was on the front line of that shadow war, I got the very clear sense that I had been quite sheltered,” he remarks.

It was true. And though he was number one in his class, his father worried that he was missing out on the world and becoming too narrow-minded as a result, so he decided to take matters into his own hands. When Wolf came home from school one day, his father asked, if he had started studying Spanish yet. Wolf was confused, so his father said, “Did I forget to tell you? I signed you up for Spanish classes.” Several months later, his father asked, if he had packed his bags yet. When Wolf was confused again, he said, “Did I forget to tell you? You’re studying in the German School of Peru next year.”

After the ensuing years of transformative world travel, Wolf graduated at the top of his class and decided to go to business school because he wasn’t sure what else to do. He would soon come to realize, however, that the business education he received from religiously reading the Economist and the Wall Street Journal, paired with watching and learning from his own entrepreneurial parents, was the best education he could have had. Japan seemed to be a dominant global presence in business at that time, so he participated in a student exchange with a university in Tokyo, but was quickly disillusioned. He then sat in on several lectures by the business school at Columbia University in New York City, where he quickly realized that the core of business was simply common sense. “At that point, I decided to just suck it up and work my way through a private business school in Germany as fast as possible, picking up jobs along the way to gain the real world experience that would be most valuable.”

Upon finishing his MBA, Wolf had just put together his English resume for the Japan External Trade Organization where he had interned previously, when he noticed a recruiting poster for a young American company called MicroStrategy. The company’s ambitious spirit captivated him, so he faxed his resume and was invited to interview in their newly established German office, where he was among their very first hires. The company sold software, but Wolf wasn’t clear on what that software accomplished, so he attended an intensive 6-week technical boot camp at their headquarters in Vienna, Virginia. “With no prior technical experience, it was grueling day-and-night training, but I came to understand the value of the technology, and I fell in love with this country in the process,” Wolf reflects.

Wolf became infamous at MicroStrategy as a jack-of-all-trades. After a year in the technical field, he diversified into management and was then put in charge of the company’s internal operations center, keeping tabs on every piece of data that traveled through the business. “I was like the company historian,” he laughs. “I was the only one who knew every sales cycle, when we won, why we lost, every competition that took place, and what value our projects delivered to the respective enterprise customers.”

Throughout that time, the company had grown from 300 to 2,700 employees, but when the bubble burst in early 2000, MicroStrategy had no choice but to lay off hundreds of its employees. “I still remember exit interviews with a guard sitting outside the office, waiting to escort that friend of mine, who had virtually gone to war with me, out of the building with a shoebox with their belongings,” Wolf says. “I promised myself I would never go through that again, which is why, at EastBanc Technologies, I consider myself more of a risk manager. I’m always certain that we’re insured against all eventualities. We experiment enough that we don’t miss out on opportunities, but we never risk the future of the mother ship.”

As MicroStrategy struggled, Wolf, being the stubborn German that he is, resolved that he’d ride the ship out and do whatever it took to stabilize it. “It cost me half my hair, but we made a comeback,” he remarks. Part of that comeback involved his transition to the sales side of the business, where he became the right hand man of the VP of Worldwide Sales and Services. “Every dollar the company generated went through us—everything from licenses, services, consulting, education, technical support, and maintenance,” he remembers. “After that, I realized that the ability to sell was a key component of running a company that I hadn’t mastered yet.”

Sitting around the table one day, the MicroStrategy team realized the company was healthy again, save for two offices. With that, Wolf was sent to the New York City office to help them adopt the new model and to learn through active participation what sales was all about. “We started from scratch,” he recounts. “I called every single customer to introduce myself and set up meetings. One by one, over the years, we turned dissatisfied customers into satisfied customers.”

Wolf’s efforts culminated one day as he waited for an Amtrak train at a New Jersey station. A potential customer called him on the phone with “one final question” before they announced their decision. Fearing the worst, Wolf braced himself for a disappointment, but the voice over the phone asked what fax number to which they should send the signed purchase order, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. “In that moment, I felt like I had finally come of age professionally,” he reflects. “Meeting someone who isn’t onboard with your product at first, building a deep relationship, and then convincing them to put their trust in you, attaching value to your product through your personality in that way—it gave me this sense that, in this capitalist country, I had done something great. I still have a copy of that first commission check.”

Looking back, Wolf can’t put a finger on any one time he failed at business, but he remembers with regret when he almost missed the birth of his first child, Lucas, because he was on his Blackberry working to close a deal with Citibank. “It hit me in that moment that my priorities were absolutely wrong,” he affirms. “The only way to save myself from myself was to hand my Blackberry back to MicroStrategy and take a long sabbatical, which allowed me to be truly present for the birth of my second child, Siena.” Though he had every intention of returning to MicroStrategy, it was during that time off that he received the call from EastBanc Technologies, and the rest is
history.

As that history continues to unfold, Wolf makes a point to sit down on an annual basis to reflect on the moments during his expansive journey that should never be forgotten. “I take the time to mine out the gold nuggets from the previous year that really are worth remembering,” he says. “I add them to the string of memories that define me—a string that grows longer and richer each year.” Whether it’s the moment he heard the muezzin’s call to prayer in Marrakesh; when he married Barb, his perfect match and an entrepreneurial, yet caring woman with exceptional emotional intelligence; reading bedtime stories every night with Lucas and Siena; the profound influence of mentors like George Moore, the founder of TARGUSinfo; or being personally invested in the lives and futures of his employees; Wolf empowers the blessings of his life each time he makes a point of remembering and honoring them.

In advising young people entering the workforce today, and speaking as a true citizen of the world, Wolf reminds us that the world is our playground, and not to be limited by what we see in front of us. “Engage your imagination, as it may not be nurtured enough by society,” he says. “Turn off the video games and the TV, and instead fall back on the things that you can’t wait to do when you have a free moment. See if you can build a career out of those things. My passion was to build and create something that flourishes long after I am gone—to become a CEO and run my own ship. I wanted to be responsible and accountable for something meaningful, and to make that something truly incredible. And as I actively engaged in the development of my character and my professional journey, I left enough leeway for the wind to blow me, as it will blow anyone, to exactly the right place—that place I truly belong.”

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