About

Every act of autobiography is a bit of creative fiction, but the following is biography you won’t glean from LinkedIn. Originally from the horse capital of the world, the first horse I can recall riding was a Lipizzaner at the age of three. Had my colleages known this, they’d have been less surprised when I rode a horse through downtown Kharkiv, Ukraine. Though built like a linebacker, I fenced throughout high school, including competing in the Junior Nationals/Olympics my senior year. I’d spend the next three years fencing under the women’s national epee coach while competeing on the US national circuit.

I started working in tech right out of high school. My first startup was an ISP run out of a guy’s basement hooking up BBS in the Minneapolis area to the Internet. I left that startup to start a window cleaning company down in Knoxville, TN. Good money, time outdoors, and I got to hang off the side of buildings. Learned that services companies are hard to scale and partners can be fickle. Ended up back in tech, this time working for the US Courts. That would seem mundane on the surface, but our court played host the White Water and Clinton v Jones trials. What I thought would be a summer gig turned into a six year stint.

Federal jobs do get boring and so I left tech again to pursue a PhD in philosophy. Marge Simpson was right, “don’t make fun of grad students. They just made a terrible life choice” It wasn’t entirely awful. I learned a ton, got paid poorly to read books, think hard about things, go to conferences and argue with people. Met a lot of interesting people along the way and worked with some really amazing intellects, but turns out working in academia isn’t anything like grad school. Word got out around town that I was on the job market and this boutique data warehousing consultancy recruited me with filthy lucre.

Today I run product and engineering for a smallish startup in the data and analytics space. Most of our customers are big boring companies in regulated industries like banking, insurance, pharma, and government. When I’m not talking to engineers or data nerds, you’ll probably find me outside fly fishing, shooting clays, riding a bike, or paddling the local lake.