Two months after being seriously injured in a car accident, Paul Berberian, co-founder, president and CEO of Raindance Communications Inc., announced his resignation from the teleconferencing company, effective immediately. Berberian will remain chairman of Raindances board of directors.
Raindances CFO Nicholas Cuccaro will replace Berberian as president and CEO on an interim basis while the Louisville, Colo.-based company searches for a successor.
Berberian, 37, said the injuries he, as well as his wife and daughter, suffered in the car accident, a high-speed head-on collision in Kauai, Hawaii, on July 28, and the rehabilitation they will require, left him little choice but to step down.
“Were going to make a full recovery, but its going to take a lot of work,” said Berberian. “Its a full-time job to recover from something this traumatic.”
Berberian said Raindance needs a CEO who can devote more time and energy to the job than he is capable of right now. “This is the right decision for the company and for me personally,” he said.
Berberian said he, his wife and daughter all suffered “broken bones, internal injuries and trauma to the body.”
“We have physical therapy five days a week, we have doctors appointments, we have therapy for the mind,” he said. “Were fortunate to be alive, and Im thankful to God for protecting us.”
Berberian took his wife and daughter on vacation to Hawaii to celebrate his wifes birthday, he said. They left just after Raindance reported second-quarter earnings of $613,000 on $16.9 million in revenues, both increases over the year-ago period.
“I still owe my wife a birthday present,” Berberian said.
Cuccaro had been Raindances CFO since March of 2001. Hes largely run the company since the accident, which left Berberian hospitalized for eight days. Prior to joining Raindance, Cuccaro was executive vice president and CFO at electronic book publisher NetLibrary. Before that, he was president and CEO of Neodata Services Inc., a data mining and magazine and product fulfillment services company, which was acquired by Electronic Data Systems Corp. and renamed Centrobe.
“The company is in great hands. I trust [Cuccaro] implicitly,” Berberian said.
Discuss this in the eWEEK forum.