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Pioneering Women
Trail-blazing females who have forever altered Connecticut's commercial landscape
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Business New Haven
3/31/2003
By: Melissa Nicefaro
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Giving Voice to the Voiceless:
Catherine G. Roraback
Born and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y. in 1920, attorney Catherine G. Roraback fought long and hard for women's rights. Roraback, a Canaan resident, was born into a family of well-known Litchfield County lawyers. She earned a degree from Mount Holyoke and was the only woman in her class at Yale University Law School.
Roraback built a civil and criminal trial practice in New Haven and later in Canaan. She was one of the first females practicing in Connecticut courts in the "early days." She still works, but has cut back her workload.
During a time before public interest law had become an accepted area of practice, Roraback made a mission of protecting the legal rights of dissenters and the dispossessed.
The litigator has several landmark cases under her belt, including Griswold v. Connecticut, a 1965 case that banned the last existing contraception law in the country, making contraception legal to use anywhere in the U.S. after June 3, 1965.
She then litigated Women v. Connecticut, the Connecticut counterpart to Roe v. Wade, which voided Connecticut's anti-abortion statutes. She also defended New Haven's Black Panthers, civil rights workers in Mississippi, and Communist Party-tainted citizens during the denaturalization proceedings that accompanied the McCarthy era.
A member of the Connecticut Women's Hall of Fame (CWHF), Roraback was a founder of the Connecticut Civil Liberties Union in 1948. She was a legal counsel to Planned Parenthood of Connecticut, the former president of the National Lawyers Guild, and a former board member of the American Civil Liberties Union. The CWHF calls Roraback the "least flamboyant of radical lawyers, known for her meticulous research and dedication to her clients, and as a deeply influential role model to many of Connecticut's most notable trial lawyers."
Dollars & Sense:
Susan Strausberg
Susan Strausberg founded Edgar Online in 1995 and has been its CEO since. Edgar Online pioneered the market for Web-delivered real time financial information and has grown into a $17 million financial information specialist traded on the NASDAQ National Market under ticker symbol EDGR.
The Norwalk company services the financial services, legal and corporate markets with both desktop subscription services as well as more complex data and technology solutions for handling financial information. Strausberg runs the company with particular oversight in the corporate sales, product development and corporate strategy areas.
With over 25 years in the financial information, publishing and film industries, including time with the Internet Financial Network, founding a custom publishing firm and producing two films, the 63-year-old Strausberg has always taken full advantage of critical technologies to advance her businesses.
Edgar Online has evolved from a single Web-based subscription service to a diversified financial information company catering to institutional clients such as the NASDAQ Stock Market, American Stock Exchange, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and other blue-chip firms.
"It's been a sea change both in terms of evolving the culture and business focus of the company over the last seven years," explains Strausberg. "Catering to the institutional market has made us a better company - better service, better products and better relationships."
Five years after the launch of her business, Strausberg was called "part of a select group of women helping to shape the future of the Internet," by Silicon Alley Reporter magazine, which named her one of the "Top 100 Silicon Alley Net Executives."
Strausberg saw an opportunity when the SEC changed its dissemination process from paper to electronic filings and built a business. Strausberg says her company is the dominant source of SEC information on the Web, and has since its IPO in May of 2000, grown into corporate sales of customized applications for corporate intranets and extranets.
Strausberg said she views her Web site as a tool that helps her deliver her product; it's not the product itself. "We're not a dot.com - we're a financial-services company."
Drug - Designing Woman:
Susan Froshauer
Susan Froshauer has also gone where not many women have gone - or at least from where not many have returned without being eaten alive.
With a Ph.D. in microbiology and molecular genetics from Harvard in 1985 and three years of post-doctoral research in the cell biology department at Yale behind her, Froshauer in 1988 joined Pfizer, where she spent five years managing an antibacterial and immune enhancer drug discovery group and six years building a technology investment portfolio.
At Pfizer, notable accomplishments include the "Big Four," a suite of four globally integrated technology collaborations and expansion of the "Drug Pfinder" program. In 2000, she received the Pfizer Central Research Award in recognition of the Big Four investments.
It could have all ended there and Froshauer would have had an impressive career.
But she took her knowledge and business sense and co-founded New Haven's Rib-X Pharmaceuticals, a bioscience company focused on the discovery of new anti-infectives. Rib-X raised approximately $22 million in a Series A financing in January 2002.
The company is exploiting a proprietary high-resolution crystal structure of the ribosome to discover new antibiotic agents. In layman's terms, Froshauer is working on discovering new antibiotics. Rib-X also has exclusive access to breakthrough structure-based drug design software developed by company co-founder William Jorgensen, also of Yale.
Froshauer says, "We founded Rib-X confident in our belief that the key elements of success in drug discovery are a validated chemical space and a validated clinical target."
She says the technology both provides a window to the binding of known antibiotics to the ribosome and presents an invaluable opportunity to design multiple new classes of antibiotic agents.
"Having reached this level of research and development funding with such a high caliber investor base, we are in an optimal position to successfully harness the intellectual richness of the ribosome technology and the collective knowledge of our scientific founders.''
Eyes on the Enterprise:
Elaine Price
Three-time CEO Elaine Price has been an entrepreneur throughout her extensive career in enterprise computing. President and CEO of Trumbull-based CYA Technologies, Price is responsible for the things that most CEOs are responsible for: strategic vision, development, relationships with the board of directors, investors and strategic partners, and overall building and leading an organization.
But while under Price's leadership, CYA Technologies has grown from 27 employees in 1998 to 76 employees in 2002. Revenues for 2002 increased by 20 percent over 2001. Price closed $7.3 million of funding for CYA in 2002, a year that was especially difficult for software companies to secure funding.
Price's career in the enterprise computing industry includes roles in programming, sales, and many senior management positions at high technology companies such as Digital Equipment Corp.
In the early 1990s, Price was president and CEO of PSI's North American subsidiary, PSI Inc., a $100 million systems integrator headquartered in Berlin, Germany. She oversaw all areas within the company including strategic direction, business development and day-to-day operations.
Price's corporate background enabled her to develop the practical knowledge required to successfully manage multiple international start-up companies from concept to sustained and profitable growth. Examples of these are Phoenix Systems Integration, LLC and its German sister company, Phoenix Systems Integration (Deutschland) GmbH. Both companies are profitable, full-service systems integrators serving Global Fortune 1000 clients.
Elaine has earned recognition as a leading business visionary. She delivers keynote addresses, leads workshops and consults internationally.
Capitalist Tools: Kathy Saint
Kathy Saint went to college for English and psychology - but she had manufacturing in her blood.
Saint returned to work ten years ago, after staying home with her young child until she entered school. But it wasn't English or psychology she chose. She joined the family business - the Schwerdtle Stamp Co. of Bridgeport - that had been in her family for four generations and was at the time being run by her father, Jack.
And after managing the operations side of the business for a couple of years, Kathy Saint - make that Kathy Schwerdtle Saint - became president of Schwerdtle last year.
Saint is a director of the Bridgeport Chamber of Commerce and is also on the board of directors of the Metal Manufacturers Education & Training Alliance (METAL). She is also on the Regional Advisory Committee for Housatonic Community College.
Like many local manufacturers, Schwerdtle Stamp has faced many challenging times over the years.
"This required us to renew ourselves by finding new markets for our talents," says Schwerdtle. During the first half of the last century Schwerdtle supplied steel marking tools to many of the large industrial manufacturers that figure prominently in Bridgeport's history. "Bridgeport Brass, Bridgeport Machines, Bassick Company and Remington Arms were all customers of our company," she says.
In the latter half of the century, as Bridgeport began to lose these manufacturers to the south and abroad, Schwerdtle began to look to new product lines with a more national market and guessed correctly that plastics was the direction to go in. Under Saint's rein, Schwerdtle brought its tool-making expertise to bear on the process of manufacturing silicone dies and it now sells to many of the largest hot stamping companies in the country such as Revlon, Graco, Matsushita etc.
"Today we are seeing many of our customers move their operations to China, Korea, India and other countries that have less expensive labor costs," she says. "Once again we are challenged to find new markets for our products and find new products that require our skills and experience and we are striving as an organization to use our creativity to solve this problem," says Schwerdtle, "so we can be around for a fifth generation."
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