About Me

Welcome to the personal section of my web site, where you get to learn all about me, or at least as much as I'd care to share on the Internet, which is without doubt more than you really want to know, but probably a lot less than many other people make public. Hopefully this short bio will allow you to get to know me a little better. In these days of Facebook, Xwitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc., I prefer to keep a low profile on social media and keep this small personal web site going instead.

I went to Princeton, do independent business and technology consulting, drive an Acura and a Porsche, live in a nice suburban colonial with a wonderful wife named Kim, and spend most of my free time working on music and photography. I also play tennis and volleyball, do "standard gym stuff," go hiking and bicycling when the weather allows, read quite a bit, and enjoy traveling to various exotic destinations, mostly tropical. The Acura is fairly new, and I've had the Porsche so long that it's now considered classic, even though I bought it new. The three great loves of my life are science (generally, but also specifically biology, entomology, and in particular beetles), computer technology, and art/music, and I've spent much of my time on the planet at their intersections: electronic music, digital photography, and a disturbingly long professional career in analytical enterprise software with graphical output.

For those familiar with Myers-Briggs personality classifications, I am an INTJ/P, seemingly becoming more P and less J by the year. (Interestingly, in 2023 I actually did a technology due diligence project for The Myers-Briggs Company.) At heart I'm a creative, analytical generalist who likes to work alone, but has spent a good portion of my career as a managing executive, partially as a way to gain independence and control over my daily activities. My analytical side goes wild during occasional bouts of assessing whether my camera gear is good enough or should be replaced, and when it might be time to build a new computer. My split analytical/creative personality is exemplified by creating programmed music with complex harmonies, and my tendency to do deep spreadsheet analysis of artistic pursuits. Want to know how much my camera gear weighed on every trip I've taken for the last 15 years? No? Well, I do, and I have the data. When I first got an Apple Pencil and iPad Pro, one of the main draws was the ability to more easily save the margin doodles created during meetings (get it? main draws?). A former colleague of mine, who was the COO and had a degree from Yale, said that doodling was a sign of genius, a sentiment with which I was of course in complete agreement.

Abridged Curriculum Vitae

I was valedictorian at Upper Dublin High School, and received an A.B. in Molecular Biology from Princeton University (class of '95). A.B. is bachelor of arts, by the way, but in Latin and all snooty-like. After I graduated I worked as a technical consultant at Formal Systems, Inc. (subsequently acquired multiple times), then a consultant with Coretech Consulting Group, Inc. (apparently still around in different form), which evolved into a stint in the MIS department at Comcast Cellular (eventually a part of AT&T). That unpleasant experience (phone and cable company, what's not to dislike?) led to my joining a little startup called PlanSponsorExchange.com when it had fewer than 10 employees. PlanSponsorExchange became InvestorForce in 2000 when the "dot com" part was going out of fashion with investors; I became the Chief Technology Officer in 2005, and remained there until I left in 2020. In the interim years we divested a portion of the business to Morningstar in 2006, were acquired by MSCI in 2013, and were later divested from MSCI to a private equity outfit called Resurgens Technology Partners in 2018 and merged with Investment Metrics, InvestorForce's chief competitor, which Resurgens had acquired in 2017. After I left, the company was sold to Confluence in 2021 for $500 million. I was only partially vested (after 20 years??? long story) - do I regret leaving? Not really. "Your money or your life," as the popular book title goes.

During my time at PlanSponsorExchange-InvestorForce-MSCI-Investment Metrics (which to me is still just InvestorForce), we went from a tiny 10-person startup, to an acquisition-crazy 180-person dot-com startup with delusions of IPO grandeur, back down to a more reasonably-sized 40-person startup following the dot-com bust in 2001, to a small piece of a 3500-person sprawling global fintech company that carried an investment bank's bureaucratic genetic lineage and had a headquarters at the World Trade Center in New York, to one half of a 60-person boutique fintech firm based in Pennsylvania and Connecticut. It was quite a ride, to say the least.

I worked out a last day with Investment Metrics of March 13th, 2020. In one of those utterly surreal moments in life, March 13th turned out to be the last day in the office for all of the employees, thanks to the sudden and dramatic shift to working from home because of the Covid-19 pandemic. I was actually one of the only people in the office that day, packing up my last couple boxes of personal items. My grand "sort of retirement" party scheduled for the day prior was first postponed a month, then two months, and then implicitly cancelled, because, really, who wants to attend a going-away party for someone a year or two after they're gone? I've never really been one for parties, so no great loss.

2020 was also supposed to be my Princeton 25th class reunion, the "big one" where everyone has supposedly reached their lofty career goals, prepared their brilliant children to matriculate at the alma mater, and made enough money to donate buckets of it back to Old Nassau. Needless to say, said 25th reunion never actually happened, didn't happen in 2021, and became a sort-of three-class reunion in 2022. The 30th, so I hear, will be epic.

Professionally, I used to spend a great deal of my time trying to do too much with too little. These days I now work for myself, and part-time at that, which is a much more agreeable setup. I did have a great team at InvestorForce, and perhaps I will work with some of them again in the future.

My undergraduate thesis at Princeton was on the origin of evolutionary constraints, an examination and rebuke of the more extreme theories put forth by proponents of structuralism in biology - like anyone cares at this point. That background in evolutionary biology and general science has given me a lot of insights on organizational dynamics and the future of technology. Early in my career I did basically everything associated with interactive media, whether that was low-level programming, content authoring, soundtrack composition, interface design, project administration or client liason work. My first real programming job came about because I was somewhat bored in college, and applied to do some part-time graphical design work at a small local software company. They discovered I knew how to write software in C++ and hired me to do that instead.

Now I don't do any coding at all, other than maintaining this web site and periodically whipping together some SQL queries to show people how data entities are related, but instead primarily lead technology due diligence engagements. I used to be focused mainly on my Plan for Total World Domination, but began seeing parallels with Michael Corleone and Anakin Skywalker, you know, the whole good-dude-gone-bad thing. I don't think I want to turn to the dark side, but who knows what my id is really after. I feel like I spent 20 years getting an education on the world of business, corporations, executive management, and such, and found that business overall is really not that interesting, although it does fund other much more interesting pursuits. These days I am more focused on my Plan for Total Karmic Enlightenment, and hope that these two plans do not come into direct conflict. I'm a bit of a perfectionistic idealist, which is a good way to get burned out by working too long in the business world.

Other Random Stuff

I watch some TV, including sports, mostly the NFL and tennis majors, although Bull Riding was surprisingly interesting to watch for a period of time. My quest to watch all of the Star Trek shows ever created, which was kicked off by a gift of the original series on DVD from my wife, is over, having completed TOS, TNG, DS9, Voyager, Enterprise, Picard, the latest seasons of Discovery and Strange New Worlds, and even the animated series (which came out the year I was born). That was a slog, let me tell you. I do draw the line at Lower Decks and other animated stuff, because they're just f***ing stupid. On the Star Wars side, I've of course seen all of movies, Clone Wars and Rebels seasons, and stay current with newer Disney+ shows. I even saw the infamous Holiday Special back in the day, on live TV and remember an episode of the Muppet Show with Luke Skywalker and R2D2. What I really crave is truly interesting, immersive, and well-done sci-fi and fantasy. Game of Thrones was great, until it sucked. I keep looking for "movies like Pan's Labyrinth," but the reality is that there simply aren't many of that calibre and imaginative intensity.

I have a box full of old PC games, which I used to play obsessively - a great many of the good first-person-shooter titles made in the 1990's and 2000's, although these days I get my FPS fix on one specialized tactical server running Call of Duty: World at War. Reading preferences include philosophy, psychology, particle physics, or whatever else I happen to want at the moment. For a period of time I was very much into reading history, especially broad encompassing world history, until I realized that people just kept doing the same dumb stuff over and over again. A friend of mine from college, who is now a history professor, I believe was somewhat put off by that description, but he admitted that people's behavior doesn't really change, only the details of how they screw up.

I also like to travel to warm, sunny places with palm trees, scenic beaches, mountains, and rainforests, and take pictures of them. Once in a while I wonder what life would be like if I had stuck with my original plan of studying large exotic beetles in the Amazon basin. Maybe I will go back to it some day, given that beetles still hold a special place in my heart. (Admittedly, it is similarly possible that some of those big beetles will spontaneously turn into flying pigs emerging from my rectum.) I do enjoy taking pictures of bugs, and when they're big they just make it easier to fill a frame well. As an introvert it is all too easy to anthropomorphize insects, imagining that their silent march through life masks great philosophical ponderings in their tiny little brains. Much more likely is that they are just hungry, intellectually oblivious, and also afraid of the large reflective glass thing looming above them.

In case you've detected some kind of pattern here--volleyball, convertible, computer expertise, sunny climes--it's true, it would be nice to eventually end up in a tropical location where the trade winds blow gently all year, preferably with a beachfront house, a Jeep Wrangler and maybe the same old Porsche in the driveway, and a very low-latency high-bandwidth Internet connection. It just depends on where the Plan for Total Karmic Enlightenment takes me.

Oh, and you can send me an email if you'd like.