About me
I’m an experienced software engineer, entrepreneur, and executive.
My interest in music led me to an interest in computers and programming, which led me to an interest in business.
I started Cakewalk in 1987 as a bootstrap—one guy, literally in a basement, writing code, answering phone, driving boxes to UPS every day. To keep going, we had to sell enough stuff that people wanted to buy. Boy did I feel silly during the dot com boom. Anyway, we had to grow organically. We were fortunate to have a great team, great customers, and good timing.
Running one company for many years sounds like it could be boring, except that any given three-year stretch, it was practically a different company in terms of the challenges and environment. Having said that, as I approached the 25th anniversary in 2012, I decided to try new things.
I spent a few years enjoying focusing on programming again, particularly open source projects using Racket.
I did a batch at Hacker School (now called Recurse Center) where I worked on projects using Clojure, Haskell, and Python.
Most recently I joined Droit Financial Technologies.
Although I’m skeptical of methodologies and manifestos (hey, I was a philosophy major), I’m very interested how and why people work well together.