Leadership - A discussion of traits, characteristics, and current news of leaders.

Qualified or not, I love to write about people that have inspired me and others to be better – at anything. I have always been an observer and looked for opportunities to learn from those around me. Stories of leadership are all around us. On Leadernotes, I share them.

My career started on Wall Street as an investment banker in corporate finance. Coincidently, I started in 1990, the same day Iraq invaded Kuwait.  I loved the challenge of the work, the talented people I met and with whom I worked and the experience that combined finance, writing and building and maintaining relationships. I worked for Furman Selz in San Francisco, Paine Webber in Los Angeles and Kidder Peabody in New York. None of these firms exist today (is there a statistically significant  correlation?) 

For the past few years, I have been an executive or investor in various start-ups. Most of these adventures have related to technology and the Internet. I guess I have a compulsion for the volatility (and tremendous opportunity) and dynamic nature of leading technology companies.

I am cycling through the second wave of the technology boom. I worked with Tim Stay to build freeservers.com into a top player in the web hosting industry. Freeservers became North Sky, Inc and from 1998 to 2000, I was President and CEO of this Internet community that grew to become a top 50 web site. We were eventually acquired by About, Inc. Tim is also a founder of Know More Media.

Prior to NorthSky, I was CFO and a Director at Inari, Inc., a provider of home networking products that operated over the power lines (eventually acquired by Thomson). It was pioneering technology that had been initially developed by Novell. I think we were too early and definitively undercapitalized to be a part of digital transmission such as broadband over power lines.

I received an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago and a B.A. from the University of Utah. I am Chairman of the Brea Education Foundation and serve on the Executive Board of the Orange County Management Association. I also attend more than a fair share of youth sports games and often find myself coaching. I have run a handful of marathons and get in on the occasional triathlon.  I am trying to master surfing and love to snowboard. I wish I went camping more with my kids.Through all these experiences, I have met many wonderful people. This has been the most meaningful aspect of my career. Oh and my name…yeah, my Mom still thinks it was genius.