In 1984, Edward DuCoin registered a trade name for $102 and started a company from his bedroom. Sixteen years later it was a NASDAQ-listed business with 1,000 employees and $20 million in revenue. Then a bookkeeping error escalated into a $692,000 IRS claim — later resolved at under $30,000 — that ripped his company and reputation apart and took a decade to overcome.

Henry Harrison sits down with DuCoin to trace the full arc: collecting newspaper payments as a kid, near-miss payrolls settled at a Jersey diner, believing his own publicity in the dot-com era, and rebuilding from unemployable to founder of Orpical, rated one of Philadelphia's fastest-growing companies two years in a row.

Along the way: Orpical's "intellectual venture capital" model of taking equity in the software it builds, the patent-pending Connection Compatibility Al ...