Noted for his vision and pioneering instincts, Rick Kearney has been an entrepreneur since an early age. He started his first company while still in high school. Although he spent a few years in corporate America, he preferred to engineer his own destiny. He is currently Chairman of Mainline Information Systems, Inc., a company he founded in Tallahassee, Florida, in 1989. Starting with a handful of people with computer programming skills, he nurtured the company into Florida’s number three high-tech company, as rated by Florida Trend magazine.

Mainline was on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing privately held companies in the United States for five years in a row; for three years the company ranked in the top 25. Rick was featured on the cover of the June 2000 Inc. issue and again in the Inc. 500 “Hall of Fame” in the October 2000 Inc. 500 special edition.

For many years, Rick has served as a board member for ITFlorida and was chairperson from 2003 to 2005. Originally founded by the Florida legislature, ITFlorida was designed to provide its members with access to lawmakers, businesses, capital, and domestic and foreign technology leaders.

For his active visionary leadership in his community, Rick was recognized with the Tallahassee Distinguished Leader of the Year Award and the Jim Moran Enterprises 2000 Entrepreneur of the Year award. In 2001, Rick received the inaugural Ethics in Business award from the Tallahassee Rotary Club. In 2005, he was honored by the Jim Moran Institute at its Entrepreneurial Excellence Showcase and Awards Banquet, where he was the recipient of the Entrepreneur of the Decade Award. The following year brought Rick more recognition for both his entrepreneurial and philanthropic pioneering efforts. On June 22, 2006, he was honored with the prestigious Ernst & Young Florida Entrepreneur of the Year Award in the field of technology.

Rick was the driving force behind Tallahassee’s “Digital Canopy,” a public-private partnership operating in downtown Tallahassee, the state capitol building and in the Tallahassee International Airport, which provides wireless service at no charge to citizens and visitors alike. He also funded the cascading waterfall at Tallahassee’s Cascade Park, a downtown recreational area that opened in 2011.

Rick also developed Summit East, a high-technology, high-amenity smart campus located in Tallahassee that supports forward-thinking companies and their employees. What was onc