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built its multiuser version of its product.

Iacobucci got another round of $8 million of funding, including $2 million from Microsoft and $1 million from Intel, enabling the company to expand.

By 1995, Citrix went public with $14.5 million in revenue, and made its 60 employees instant millionaires, including Iacobucci. At 35, his stock was worth $7 million. But he said his focus was never money.

"It was about changing the world," Iacobucci said. "Money was just a byproduct."

He said he saw an opportunity to change the course of how computing was done. He ran his company like it was a mission, not a job.

Iacobucci admits he was somewhat of a nerd and geek.

"But I had enough polish that I could sell my idea," he said.

Citrix grew so much that Microsoft notified it in February 1997 that it was going to compete, and the stock dropped from $28.75 to $9.75 per share. Iacobucci spent 11 weeks negotiating with Microsoft every day, finally announcing a partnership in June 1997 that sent the stock up to $40. By December, it was trading at more than $70 a share.

Citrix continued to grow, acquiring companies that added value, increasing from $124 million in revenue in 1997 to $249 million in 1998, $403 million in 1999 and $470 million in 2000, when Iacobucci left. He said he had aggressive ideas of growth, and met with reluctance from the board.

"I had been there since the beginning, and if we hadn't taken the risks we had taken, we wouldn't have been there at all," he said.

The company had market capital of more than $20 billion.

"I felt pretty secure in our accomplishments," he said.

Iacobucci was 47. He thought he would retire.

"My retirement lasted 60 days, and I was jumping out of my skin," he said. "I had the urge to do something."

He had bought a plane a year or so earlier to travel for Citrix, for convenience and to save time.

Fractional ownership of jets and full plane charters were expensive and out of reach of most people.

"My idea was that normal people could use this flexibility and productivity if there were a model to sustain it," he said.

Iacobucci spent the next four years with a team, creating scheduling dispatching software that would work for small jets, creating a business model on a per-seat basis, and convincing the Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Transportation to approve it. Boca Raton-based DayJet was born, pioneering a new model in aviation.

"It was a technology company that just happened to fly airplanes," he said. The idea: "We won't tell you what the schedule is; you tell us where you want to go and we will tell you how much it costs and we'll make it work."

Iacobucci had invested most of the company's $80 million in start-up capital. But the company's strategy required it to raise another $50 million just when the market was collapsing.

DayJet filed for bankruptcy protection in November 2008, about 14 months after starting service.

"It wasn't the business model or the airplane, it was the lack of growth capital," he said. "... It was the most exciting and amazing thing we ever did, but we got caught in the September 2008 debacle."

He said he learned a valuable lesson in the dismantling of the company, but one he would not like to experience again.

"My objective is to build things and not to tear them down and sell them into pieces," he said. "It was a painful experience, but a valuable one. I think I'm a better entrepreneur because of it."

Iacobucci had sold his Citrix stock and put most of it in DayJet.

"I'm a big believer in following your dreams ... If you really believe in something, you're foolish not to go all in."

After he left DayJet, Iacobucci took some time to think.

"I knew I probably needed to work, so I started looking at different things. My focus was to build something else."

He felt there was a need for a universal index or catalog of everything in a company, all the data, files, emails, etc.

He created VirtualWorks, based in Boca Raton, and bought a small company in Norway that had an enterprise search product, and merged it, converting the product to make it applicable to more companies.

"The future is going to be getting use of all that stuff rather than occupying bits on disks, and I think we are on the forefront of that," he said. "It's about finding out where data is."

Iacobucci, who lives in Delray Beach, has just closed on an $8 million round of financing from high worth individuals, institutions and strategic partners. He has about 150 investors, and he doesn't hold the majority of shares.

With 35 employees, split between South Florida and Norway, VirtualWorks is expected to reach $3 million in revenue this year, he said. And in the first quarter of 2012, VirtualWorks will begin a major marketing launch of the product.

What has driven him most of all is "changing the world and building something that lasts, proving that something can be done."

Money is not even among the top five motivators, he said.

"If you put it at the top, you're almost doomed to failure because you focus on the wrong thing," he said. "You don't focus on innovation. You focus on doing things the way they have been done, because you don't want risk."