I've had a diverse career across several industries and three countries. The common thread is a willingness to try new things and change how they're done—driven first by hubris, now by curiosity and a desire to understand how things actually work.

After my MBA at Wharton, I joined DuPont in Moscow. These were heady times: we arrived as the Soviet Union began to wobble and watched it crumble in 1991. The post-Soviet economy was one massive startup—full of ambiguity and opportunity. Eventually the climate shifted, and Russia became a dangerous place to do business without political protection at the top.

We moved to Atlanta for my wife's job. Returning to the US after ten years in Russia felt like landing from Mars. A Wharton alum took a chance on me at an internet bank—my first full immersion in online business after years of poking at technology as it appeared in the workplace. From there I moved to a global distribution system (the companies that manage airline bookings for travel agents). The industry was racing to embrace online distribution, and we helped enable it—largely by screen-scraping green screens at scale. We powered every major online travel agency except Travelocity.

That work pulled me toward a small startup aiming to make airfare pricing transparent. Our proprietary technology let us be first to know when fares were rising or falling, which we used to tell consumers whether they were getting a good deal and to flag standout prices.

Next, I joined three guys in a room building bulk email marketing tools for small businesses. Internet technology was still young, but open-source software and hosted servers suddenly made it possible to reach a global audience from a small Atlanta office. Through a mix of luck, good technology, and marketing, we bootstrapped the company and captured the lion's share of small-business email marketing. I left in 2014; the business sold for $12 billion in 2021.

Hoping to repeat that experience, I advised a bootstrapped website builder in Hamburg. The founders had drawn the wrong conclusions about the source of their success and lost their customer focus. I helped them reorganize and restart on a new technology platform.

Since then, I've focused on photography, advised a few US companies, and experimented with rural economic development in northeastern Vermont. 

I'm at the stage where I want to put my knowledge—and my scars—to good use helping others.