Joe Pantuso's advice: do it now, don't wait for permission and do what the competition won't

When Joe Pantuso was a boy, he learned all the usual things in school -- spelling, math, history. His lessons, however, did not include the word that would come to define him most: entrepreneur.

Now the successful, 40-year-old father of three children and founder of four companies is, while continuing his own tech ventures, a startup advocate.

"I want to encourage people to do it themselves," he says.

Pantuso's expertise is computer file compression, network security and internet games. His roster of startups: Renegade Graphics, NeoWorx Inc. (acquired by McAfee), TrayGames, and Fortezza Technology, which will introduce a parental controls product by the end of this year. Plus, he has a hand in numerous projects and partnerships, such as Blackbook EMG, Ignite Cincinnati and Secret Cincinnati. He's got four patents and three books to his credit. He's lived in at least four states and even spent time in Singapore, where he concentrated on internet games "when browsers were new."

Ohio is home now. He relaxes by baking bread and making his own yogurt, pursuits that are similar to business because they involve "conceptualizing and executing."

On the day he shares his thoughts about being a serial entrepreneur he's come from the south side of Dayton to downtown Cincinnati. He's a tall, gracious guy, dressed casually. He speaks passionately and laughs easily.

He recalls being an electrical engineering major and tinkering on the side with some projects. Eventually, he got impatient. He worked at PKWare for a while and had a hand in development of the .zip file format, PKLite and PKZip, then started Renegade Graphics at age 23.

He gained his business knowledge largely through his own reading and investigation.

"I didn't even have the vocabulary of an entrepreneur," he says. "I got my MBA in books. My information about entrepreneurship was very uneven."

He bootstrapped his way to market. And never looked back.

Yes, he says, being an entrepreneur is fulfilling -- and no, he says, it isn't always easy. One of his companies was "on the edge of death every minute" financially. He's proud of each company he created and doesn't have a favorite.

Although he's devoured lots of material about how other people climbed the business world ladder and learned from their experiences, he doesn't have one, specific role model.

But distilled from everything in his background comes his Pantuso's five pieces of advice for the fledgling entrepreneur:

Do it now. "There never will be a 'right' time." Life will always have complications and you shouldn't backburner a viable opportunity.

Don't wait for permission. Trust yourself and go, he says.

Find out what the entrenched competition can't or doesn't dare do -- and consider doing it. Example: In the late 1990s, Pantuso created a security system which collected and analyzed data from computers' firewalls; his innovation enabled fast detection of the CodeRed II Internet worm. In 2001, Pantuso's company was acquired by anti-virus giant McAfee and Pantuso oversaw transition of his company's firewall into the next generation McAfee firewall.

Do it big. "There's so much going on it's hard to stand out and be heard."

Finally, he says, remember that friends and family are not reliable critics.

He offers a related insight in his blog "Opinionated: Startups, Entrepreneurship, Cincinnati."

"As soon as things started looking pretty grim in late 2008 I knew it was time to be thinking about starting new companies. At the time it was mainly intuition, and the knowledge that the majority of great companies in existence today were started during down cycles. I also believe in the platinum rule of "Invest where there is pain," which is an unpleasant philosophy on the surface but when you dig down it is about faith in humanity's enduring ability to bounce back, to fight through adversity . . . So wake up and smell the opportunity. Get out there and get building."

Pantuso knows he's got street cred as a coder-to-CEO guy, and he knows he's good at running teams. But he acknowledges "there's a 'best by' date on my technical abilities." That's why he's looking ahead to Pantuso 2.0.

He likes to mentor, so eventually "I would like to shift to the investment side as an angel, and have my finger in other companies," he says.

He's eager to reach down into the classrooms, too.

"Entrepreneurs are not introduced in schools enough," he says. Does anybody remember ever hearing a career counselor suggest entrepreneur as a viable option? "I want to get in front of kids and start talking about it."