Rock Solid’s Pérez resigns after 20-yr. tenure
Ángel L. Pérez, a well-known entrepreneur and vice president of Rock Solid, recently resigned from his post after 20 years at the San Juan-based software engineering company, News is my Business learned exclusively.
Pérez, who officially stepped down on June 24, will stay involved with the company as shareholder. He will also remain as an active board member of Grupo Guayacán, which he chaired for three years until December 2020.
“My plate is full. I’m not retiring to go sit at home to watch TV. I’m retiring because I completed my chapter at Rock Solid and I met what I wanted to accomplish,” Pérez told News is my Business. “I took the company where it needed to go, and now there’s a younger generation who I recruited out of college who is running the company.”
From 1994 to 2000, Pérez oversaw the Computer Science Department for Latin America at Federal Mogul, Rock Solid’s first client. It was there that he met who would be his partners, Rick Brown, Ray Mitchell and Lon Ellis, who founded Rock Solid Technologies in 1994
The three men were working with Federal Mogul and Ernst & Young to develop and implement a point-of-sale system for international auto parts stores, beginning with the Centro Parts stores in Puerto Rico.
Pérez joined Rock Solid in early 2000. He immediately “brought managerial maturity, a local face to the business and a special ability to recruit resources, the cream of the crop from the University of Puerto Rico, especially from his Alma Mater, the university’s Mayagüez Campus,” the company said in a release.
“His skills were critical to Rock Solid’s long-term growth and success,” Rock Solid stated.
“From my first day when we were six team members until today, when we have more than 200, I always said that we weren’t a small company, we were and are a company on the way to bigger and better things,” said Pérez.
Pérez steered the company through highs and lows, from benefiting from the backing of Grupo Guayacán’s venture capital funding network to transition from a services provider to a products firm, to facing the impact of Hurricane María in 2017.
In March 2021, Pérez headed Rock Solid’s announcement of the acquisition of Arizona-based PrimeGov, a provider of virtual public meeting participation and agenda management solutions for local governments, marking company’s largest expansion to date.
“Angel has also led Rock Solid’s efforts to give back to the local community through numerous efforts and roles in industry organizations, including founding the Puerto Rico chapter of the International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners (IAMCP) and serving as its LATAM president and most recently as chairman of the board of Grupo Guayacán, Inc., an organization dedicated to the development of entrepreneurs in Puerto Rico,” said Brown, now chairman of Rock Solid’s board.
Pérez will now focus on providing support and mentoring to 10 startups in which he has invested through his participation at Grupo Guayacán. He has also already been called to provide consulting services, he said.
“I don’t want to work, but I also don’t want to become obsolete and lose validity. I want to work 8 hours a week. There are people who have already asked me to be on their board and to do consulting,” Pérez said.
