{"id":10222,"date":"2012-09-17T14:34:23","date_gmt":"2012-09-17T18:34:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/news\/article.php?ArticleID=10222"},"modified":"2012-09-17T14:34:23","modified_gmt":"2012-09-17T18:34:23","slug":"10222_driven-to-succeed-peter-aquino-83","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/entrepreneur\/2012\/09\/17\/10222_driven-to-succeed-peter-aquino-83\/","title":{"rendered":"Driven to Succeed \u2013 Peter Aquino \u201983"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span>Peter Aquino \u201983 has an entrepreneurial spirit and unflagging ambition, qualities that have served him well through the years. The 51-year-old chairman, president and CEO of Primus Telecommunications, was born and raised in Paterson, New Jersey, where he beat the odds by graduating from John F. Kennedy High School in a class where more than half of the students did not. <br \/><\/span><\/p>\n<p><!--more--> <\/p>\n<p><span>\u201cI always wanted to be successful through hard work,\u201d says Aquino, who was both class president and a captain of the high school football team. <br \/><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>He took that ambition to Montclair State, where he majored in finance. \u201cI focused on doing my best in school,\u201d he says. \u201cMontclair was a great place to get a good education and be around really smart people. Many of my finance professors were fantastic.\u201d <br \/><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>His hard work paid off. In his senior year, Aquino received a scholarship from New Jersey Bell (now Verizon) and went to Harvard to assist in teaching a graduate course in international monetary economics and finance. Upon returning from Harvard, Aquino joined New Jersey Bell and eventually Bell Atlantic in Virginia, where he worked in rates and tariffs, finance, competition marketing, operations and regulatory and corporate development. <span>&nbsp;<\/span>But after 13 years, Aquino says, he found the telephone company \u201ca little boring.\u201d He left Bell in 1995 to help build a telecommunications company in Venezuela from the ground up. <br \/><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>\u201cIt was very entrepreneurial,\u201d he says. \u201cWe provided the leadership, planning and oversight of a telephone company from scratch.\u201d The company, Veninfotel (now NetUno), became Latin America\u2019s first fiber-based provider of \u201ctriple-play\u201d telecommunications \u2013\u2013 television, high-speed Internet access and telephone service combined. <br \/><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>When Aquino returned to the states in 2000, the telecom industry was in bad shape. \u201cIt was a horrible time,\u201d he says, \u201cbut I was having very good career momentum.\u201d He found that his experience overseas, combined with his years at Bell, positioned him to help struggling companies get back on their feet. For the next 10 years Aquino became a restructuring expert, helping several companies through bankruptcy and out toward a resurgence, including RCN Corp, where he served as president and CEO from 2004 to 2010. <br \/><\/span><\/p>\n<p>Aquino\u2019s advice to students is to get experience overseas. \u201cTo succeed at higher-level jobs that are global in nature, you must have some international experience that\u2019s not just from reading a book or newspaper,\u201d he says. \u201cYou need to go there and make it part of your repertoire.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Peter Aquino \u201983 has an entrepreneurial spirit and unflagging ambition, qualities that have served him well through the years. The 51-year-old chairman, president and CEO of Primus Telecommunications, was born and raised in Paterson, New Jersey, where he beat the odds by graduating from John F. Kennedy High School in a class where more than [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":110222,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-262_feliciano-center-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/entrepreneur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/entrepreneur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/entrepreneur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/entrepreneur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/entrepreneur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10222"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/entrepreneur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10222\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/entrepreneur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/110222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/entrepreneur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/entrepreneur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/entrepreneur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}