B.S., 1981; M.S., 1983
Vice President of Marketing, Covad Communications
San Jose, California  “I started working in broadband in 1986, and I’m still doing it 20 years later. The technology moves fast, but the market often moves much slower. Most new technologies—television, computers, broadband—take a long time to gain market momentum and penetration. FAX is one of the few technologies that became mainstream almost overnight. “I’m part of an industry that changes the way people live and work every day, and that’s exciting.” |
After earning two degrees in mathematics at UAB in the early 1980s, Debbie Jo Severin had little reason to think she would wind up in marketing. But Severin has enjoyed the twists and turns of a professional and personal path that has led her from Birmingham to Silicon Valley—with connections to Sweden. Severin heads the marketing effort for Covad, a broadband company that was launched in 1996. Covad was the first company to commercially deploy DSL (digital subscriber line) technology in the United States and owns and operates the largest national broadband network. It is the only national facilities-based provider of data, voice, and wireless telecommunications solutions for small- and medium-sized companies. The company has about 1,000 employees, and it recently received two prestigious marketing awards from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and Adweek magazine. About Covad:
“We offer high-speed Internet access, DSL, Voice over IP, T1, Web hosting, managed security, and other telecommunications services. We target small businesses, usually of 100 employees or less, and we also sell wholesale. For example, if you buy an AT&T DSL line that is outside their territory, you would get a Covad line. “We’re not AT&T or BellSouth, but we compete against the big guys, plus all of the small, emerging companies. Many days my job actually seems like rocket science. On one hand, we are doing category creation with Voice over IP. But we also are competing with well established brands. It’s not just a matter of having a good product and a good price. You have to target correctly and position yourself well.” |
One of Covad’s recent awards was for its groundbreaking “The Ringing” campaign, which was one of the first advertising programs to feature Voice over IP targeted to small- and medium-sized businesses. On the company’s approach to advertising:
“We are very edgy, a little bit on the dark side. The Ringing Campaign was a spoof off science fiction and The Ring film. The idea was, ‘Don’t let your phone system be the death of you.’ At the end of the day, small business people don’t want to come to work and worry about their phone system. Some don’t see their phone system as a competitive advantage. Our goal is to introduce drama so that we pose the question: Have you thought about your phone system? Is it giving you an edge?” |
On the creative process:
“We’ve found that the best creative minds often don’t want to work for a company—they get bored really fast—so we work with agencies. We go to them and say, ‘We want to grow brand awareness and increase sales, say, 10 percent, and our budget is this.’ They come back with ideas for reaching our target segment, using a variety of media. It could be TV, direct mail, special events, online, or all of the above. “We have a team that is responsible for acquisition of new customers, and I think we have a nice combination, with a lot of our advertising online. We’ve found that 90 percent of technology decisions are researched online.” |
Severin was born in Atlanta, but her family moved to Birmingham when she was 10 years old and she graduated from Shades Valley High School. She laughs when she thinks back on the teen-aged thought process that determined her college destination. On making a college choice:
“My parents were middle class, so my ability to go out of state was limited, unless I got a scholarship. And while I was a good student, I wasn’t going to command a scholarship out of state. So my parents gave me a choice: I could go to Auburn or Alabama without a car or I could go to UAB with a car. I chose UAB and the car. Plus, I had a boyfriend at the time who was in Birmingham, and that was a factor as well. “Your frame of reference is so limited when you make those decisions. But coming to UAB worked out well for me. I knew I had an aptitude for science and math, so with the medical school and engineering school, I thought I would be in a good place academically. And I thought being in Birmingham might present good professional opportunities down the road.” |
That proved to be the case. But first, Severin had to choose a major, and a lot of thinking went into that decision. On becoming a math major:
“When I think back 30 years, my choices along the lines of science and math were fairly limited—engineering, computer science, or medicine. I never had the deep longing to do the medical side, and computer science and engineering at the time were very industrialized. “My mother sent me to lunch with a civil engineer who proved to be a bit of a male chauvinist. His ‘encouragement’ was that if I got a degree in engineering, I would be hired easily and would be paid more than men because the company would need to fill a quota. And the best part, he said, was that I wouldn’t be given any real work to do. That got the hair up on the back of my neck. “Little did I know that he had a narrow view and the world would change and wonderful opportunities would open up for women in engineering. But majoring in math gave me a lot of flexibility without pigeonholing me. As it turns out, I have this creative element, and I’m gregarious; I’m not an introvert—and that helped open up opportunities down the road.” |
After earning her bachelor’s degree, Severin received a scholarship for graduate school at UAB. She taught math at the university for about four years before deciding to move into the private sector. On making a career change:
“Birmingham was making a conversion from a steel town to a white-collar city, being led by UAB as the number-one employer during the early ’80s. But I remembered how hard it had been for my friends to get jobs during the recession of 1981. I was in academia, but I didn’t have a Ph.D., and I thought I wouldn’t have much job security when the next recession hit. It seemed like a good time to try something different.” |
Severin tried several major employers in Birmingham and got hired at BellSouth. Her math background helped her land a position in marketing research, and she went on to gain experience in a variety of areas, including market strategy, product marketing, and brand marketing. In the early 1990s, she met Lars Severin, a native of Stockholm, Sweden, who worked as a software engineer for Apple in California. She moved to California to work for Pac Bell, and the couple recently celebrated their 14th wedding anniversary. They have made it a tradition to travel to Sweden at least every other year. On the joys of Sweden:
“It’s a beautiful country, and the people are great. It’s a very even-keeled society. The people are intense in terms of family, but in general, they are mellow and easy going. Swedes have a great tradition in sports, especially in golf, tennis, and hockey. And the country has produced some great engineers. The refrigerator was invented in Sweden. And the Nobel Prize originated in Sweden, named for the scientist who invented dynamite.” |
Lars Severin now is a manager at Broadcom, a semiconductor company. Debbie Jo worked through several transitions at Pac Bell before finding her way to Covad. Pac Bell merged with SBC, was sold to Prime Cable, and then was bought by MCI. In 1999, she joined NorthPoint, a DSL startup in Silicon Valley. At the same time, Lars owned his own company, which he later sold. The Severins got an up-close view of the Silicon Valley boom and bust in the 1990s. On the ups and downs of the technology world:
“Prime Cable gave me equity, and then it was bought by MCI, so Lars and I both had transactions that would have allowed us to retire. But within a year, they were both worth nothing. I keep my stock certificate framed as a reminder that you can have a stock that one day is worth more than you ever imagined and the next day is worth nothing. “That bust period was very unsettling. A number of our friends—in some cases both a husband and wife—lost their jobs. There had been so much activity, and then the crash took out so many people. Even in the companies that survived, there was not a lot of investment. “The beautiful thing is that if you live in California, you know it is a land of extremes—from fires to earthquakes to the most beautiful weather you can imagine. We knew Silicon Valley would come out of it; it was just a matter of how long it would take. There is so much technology development here that the highs and lows are magnified.” |
After the Silicon Valley bust, Severin took about a year and a half off and then worked briefly for a small optics company that did not make it. She joined Covad in 2003 and continues to learn about the rapidly changing telecommunications industry. On issues in telecommunications:
“When technology moves this fast, the biggest issue is security. At Covad, we own our own network and we are able to handle many of our own security issues. How to handle voice and data—taking an analog voice file, digitizing it, and putting it over a data network—is at the forefront now. The FCC is trying to figure out how to treat voice and data. “Because of new mergers, competition is another issue. When AT&T buys BellSouth, we will be down from seven to three large telecoms—AT&T, Verizon, and Qwest. How do you keep competition when you have such huge monopolies?” |
Working in the technology sector has presented Severin with many opportunities and challenges. It also brought her close to the origins of a comedy classic. When Severin worked at Pac Bell, she sat about three cubicles away from Scott Adams, best known today as the creator of the Dilbert comic strip. When Severin clips and saves a particularly funny Dilbert, she can’t help but think of her former colleague. On being close to “Ground Zero” for the creation of Dilbert:
“I knew Scott in 1992, and Dilbert was only published in the San Francisco Chronicle at the time. We all used to joke that we could talk about various events, and they would show up in Dilbert the next day. In the early days, the strip was such a techie and corporate thing. But he found a little niche, and it turned into something with broad appeal. Scott was very unassuming, definitely not a bigger-than-life personality. But he had this amazing creative side that came out in Dilbert.” |
The Dilbert story—and Severin’s own professional experiences—illustrate a lesson that Severin learned at UAB. On finding a career path:
“I had an advisor in the math department at UAB, Dr. Siegel, and he told me that a study had shown that 10 years after graduation, most people were in jobs not directly related to their degrees. That relieved a lot of my angst about majoring in math. People should gravitate toward what they are good at, and I think things will work out. “When I look at resumes today, I’m not necessarily looking for majors in marketing. I’m looking for smart people who are progressing in their professional development. In the end, formal education is the right foundation, experience is an enriching classroom, and then intelligence and creativity allows the ordinary person to do ‘rocket science.’” |
|
|
|