I've had a varied career across several industries and three countries. Looking back, the common thread is that I kept saying yes to new things, at first out of hubris and later out of curiosity about how things actually work. I've also come to see how much depended on timing, and on people willing to take a chance on me.

After my MBA at Wharton, I joined DuPont in Moscow. We happened to arrive just as the Soviet Union began to wobble, and we watched it come apart in 1991. The post-Soviet economy was one massive startup, full of ambiguity and opportunity, and being there at that moment was mostly luck. 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. Coming back 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, which gave me my first real immersion in online business. From there I moved to a global distribution system, one of the companies that manage airline bookings for travel agents. The industry was racing toward online distribution, and our team helped make that possible, largely by screen-scraping green screens at scale. Our systems ended up behind most of the major online travel agencies.

That work led me to a small startup trying to make airfare pricing transparent. Our technology could tell when fares were moving, which let us tell travelers whether they were getting a good deal.

Next, I joined three guys in a room building email marketing tools for small businesses. Open-source software and hosted servers had just made it possible for a small Atlanta office to reach customers worldwide. There were four of us: a developer, a design genius, a CEO, and me as COO, working on strategy and pushing the product. We were having a great time, beating the competition and putting out new features faster than anyone else. Mostly we were lucky to be in the right place at the right time with the right skills. What we started kept growing until it became the standard for small-business email marketing. I left in 2014. The company sold for $12 billion in 2021, and much of the credit for that belongs to the people who stayed.

Hoping to find something similar, I advised a bootstrapped website builder in Hamburg. Like many successful companies, it had drifted away from its customers. I worked with the founders to reorganize and rebuild 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've been fortunate, and I've made plenty of mistakes along the way. I'd like to use what I've learned from both to help others.