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Carmella Cassetta, CTO of PrintNation

by Peg Townsend

First at Barnes and Noble Online and now with PrintNation she has be at the epicenter of online sales via the Web.   She is a role model and has come a long way from where she started.   

Waterbury, Conn., is a gritty, working-class kind of town.

It's the kind of place where immigrants worked hard to find the American dream and where the biggest employer in town was the brass mill.

Carmella Cassetta's life was just as gritty as the town where she grew up.

Her father, mentally ill for many years, died when she was 5 years old, leaving her mother to raise eight children alone.

Her mother had come to the United States from a little town called Santa Croce just outside of Naples and she knew what it would take to keep her family together.

So even though the idea of a mother leaving her children to work outside the home was as revolutionary in the '60s as the idea of a machine that dispensed cash, Cassetta's mother went to work.

She got a job as a machine operator at the brass factory, sometimes taking on additional work to buy her kids shoes or books.

They were poor, living in a house with only one bathroom, but Cassetta's mother never let her kids lose sight of what was important.

She told them that education was the road map to success and that hard work was what got you to your destination.

"She encouraged all of us as we grew up to believe in ourselves, to work hard at what we want in life, and to have faith that we will succeed," said Cassetta, who went on to be one of the architects of Barnes and Nobel's successful online bookstore and is now helping to grow a startup called PrintNation.

"She worked hard all the time I was growing up," Cassetta says.

"I looked at her and thought I can work this hard too."

That work ethic is one of the reasons behind Cassetta's success in the world of e-commerce. That, and the fact, Cassetta believes we are each responsible for how our life turns out.

"We have the power of choice to steer our own course," she says.

Cassetta is petite 41-year-old with short black hair and a rebellious kind of energy.

She was the only one in her family who refused to go to Catholic high school and says she'd rather take the untested path than the safe tried-and-true road.

In fact, she worked a job for a year at a big-name corporation and, even though her salary and stock options would have been enough to make most people swoon, she didn't like the feel of it.

"It was just too corporate; too much process and procedure," says Cassetta.

But give her a startup, where everything is new and decisions have to be made at the speed of light and Cassetta is in her element.

"I like the energy and the opportunity to move fast," says Cassetta, sitting in her office at PrintNation's headquarters in Irvine, Calif.  "It's also about building a company.

"It's the best of the best."

Cassetta got her first taste of that startup kind of energy at Barnes and Noble.

She had worked for Waldenbooks in Stamford, Conn. for 12 years, training users on things like Excel and Word until she had learned so much she ended up designing and installing networks.

But when the company was purchased it was time to move on and she took a job with Barnes and Noble, doing the same kind of thing.

But about a year into her job, she got a call from Barnes and Noble executives who told her that the giant book company wanted to start an online bookstore.

"It was a great opportunity because the Internet was brand new and so if you didn't have the background, it didn't matter," Cassetta says.

With a cramped office on the seventh floor of the company's Fifth Avenue headquarters, Cassetta and a team of four others went to work.

She laughs.

"We didn't even know what a web server was and I remember someone asking, 'what's a URL?'" Cassetta says.

"It was just a whole new thing."

As the project grew, more staff was hired, spilling out into the hallway. 

"You'd look down the hallway, you'd see rows and rows of people and rows and rows of computers," Cassetta says.

Quiet computer programmers sat across from web designers with earrings in their eyebrows.  Cassetta shared an office with three other people.

There were late night meetings, take-out pizza, and the kind of energy that Cassetta came to love.

"It was just wild," she says.

When the website was launched, everyone fought over who would get to answer the first email inquiry that came in.

Sales trickled in, but as Christmas approached, they became a torrent.

"It just took off and went from there," Cassetta says.

A year later, it was named the fastest growing e-commerce site in the country.

Cassetta was named vice president of technology for Barnes and Noble and given an office that looked out over the Statue of Liberty.

It was a great place to be.

But Cassetta had always been intrigued by California and she and her husband decided to move west.

She got a job with a big corporation, but found she missed the kind of energy that came with building something from the ground up.

When Tony and Freddie Seba of PrintNation offered her a job as chief technology officer, she jumped at the chance.

It meant giving up stock for stock options and forgoing bonuses, but Cassetta didn't mind. 

"There was a lot of passion behind it (the decision to leave)," Cassetta says.

For her, a startup was the perfect fit.

For the past year, Cassetta has been helping to grow a business that provides equipment and services online to commercial printers across the country.

The business-to-business e-commerce site boasts more than 100,000 products and round-the-clock customer service.

It's got that same kind of decision-a-minute atmosphere as barnesandnoble.com and a dedication to product that Cassetta loves.

She likes to tell the story of how, after months of work, PrintNation was ready to launch its website.

Early that morning, a strong earthquake struck, threatening to spill computers and equipment onto the office floors.

An engineer rushed to hold up a stack of equipment as the earthquake roared around him.

"Please God," he shouted to the sky, "not after all this."

That kind of passion and dedication is what Cassetta loves.

With the same kind of confidence that helped her succeed at Barnes and Noble, Cassetta is tackling the world of business-to-business e-commerce, which has a whole different set of demands than the one she was used to.

"Networking with other people, books, education and asking questions gives me the ability to take on new challenges with the confidence I will succeed," she says.

She also knows it takes hard work.

Cassetta puts in long hours, regularly working 12-hour days and bringing work to her Mediterranean style home in Newport Coast to make sure a project gets done on time.

But she always keeps Sundays open, when she and her husband like to ride his Harley Davidson through the hills or comb through antique shops.

That's what it takes to make a business thrive -  hard work and commitment.

"You have to really like it," Cassetta says of her job. 

"We work lots of hours, but when you see the site go up for the first time, there's nothing like it."

It's a value, she says, that came from her mother, who always told her that she could succeed in whatever she chose to do, who taught her that hard work pays off.

Her mother has two words for Cassetta now, words that reach right into Cassetta's heart.

"I'm proud," her mom says.

That's as satisfying as any stock options.

A FEW MORE MINUTES WITH CARMELLA CASSETTA:

Who would you like to have dinner with?

I think it would be fascinating to talk to Bruce Springsteen about the life experiences that inspired his music.  The feeling and emotion expressed in his music has moved me for many years.  I also would love to talk to Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee.  the Internet was born from their ideas. It would be fascinating to talk about the history of what has transpired.  I wonder if they knew at the time what an impact their work would have?

What's your favorite quote?

"To thine own self be true."

What advice would you give to women entering the technology field?

Working in a technology field means adapting to change constantly.  I learned very early on that it is a constant learning process.  You won't always know the answer.  It often takes a lot of research and problem solving to determine the solution - but the key is there is always an answer. You just have to be willing to work hard to find it.