I took a pretty roundabout way to get to where I am now. Um, I went Teoh College and studied economics and history. Um, with the plan to go to law school eventually, and I after I graduated from undergrad I worked in New York, briefly did to the summer program at a trading company. They're doing risk management analysis. And then I joined a software company, Qualtrics, where I worked for about a year before starting law school. Um, the reason I went to law school is because I always wanted to end up in business in some way, shape or form. So I was debating between getting an MBA or getting my J. D. And after talking to some people, I decided that the JD was probably going to be best for me, even though it was one year extra, which was kind of a bummer. Um, I decided that that having that that attorney background would end up being pretty helpful for me, So I decided to go to law school. And then the next question for me was whether or not I would be a lawyer for an extended period of time on and then make my transition over into business or if I would be able to go just directly into business from law school. So while I was in law school, I worked at a law firm. I studied corporate law and eventually started doing some consulting for the company that I work at now. Um, and while while I was doing some consulting for them myself and the founders of the company that I work at now, I decided to start our own software project. And so this was one of the bigger, more formative steps for me. Um e I did it wall. I was still in law school. It was during my third year of law school, and, uh, we started this software company after we had met with some hotel executives in California, and I wanted to overcome some problems that we saw with meetings. And Esso decided to create a software that could facilitate more open discussion and meetings, and at first it generated a lot of interest. Are launch was covered by fast company. We saw a lot of big companies signing up to use it on to demo it out. We have trouble getting it to stick and getting it to spread within the companies and then eventually decided to kind of sunset it and under that, selling the software to a conglomerate. So the reason that was really informative for me was one at all of that happened within a fairly tight time span. That all happened within about 8 to 9 months, starting that software company, launching it, getting some good traction and then deciding to sunset it, Ah, that'll happen very rapidly and kind of showed me where my long term interests would lie. Not only did I want to be in business, but I wanted to have more of a controlling stake and, uh, have more of an entrepreneurial mindset with it. So after that happened, the co founders of the company that I work at now gave me an opportunity to become a partner with them in the company on and have been doing that since

Um so So right now, as as the CEO of Go Fish Digital, I wear a lot of hats. Collectively, me and my two partners decided t transition to more formal titles of Chief something. One of my partners is chief technology officer. The other one is the chief executive officer. We all actually have equal say and how the company is run, but have decided to partition the different parts of the company into two different groups for each of us. So, um, I end up handling Ah, lot of the day to day. I have a hand in finance the financials of the company. Um, I have a hand in hiring. Obviously, I have a hand in the legal side of things being an attorney, um, and then also have probably a lot of my time spent in actual strategy for where the company should go in terms of what my work schedule looks like before cove it. And before the lockdowns are, we call them our core hours. We have a flexible work environment. Even before cove it, We worked from home two days a week, so we'd work in the office three days a week and from home two days a week. And, uh, because our work environment is more flexible, we have what we call core hours, which are basically just an expected number of hours where most people most of the time are expected to be working and available, so that we can at least have team discussions and coordinate. And those core hours air a 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Eastern. Um, the reason that it's 8 to 4 instead of a more typical 9 to 5 is primarily for commuting in traffic. We found that if we could get to work little earlier and leave work a little earlier, we could avoid a lot of traffic and end up having just a better work, life balance and overall, higher happiness with work because we were in spending as much time community. That being said, I typically would get into the officer on 7 30 a little bit before most people got there a good chance to get some work done before people started filtering in. Andan would usually leave the office around 4 30 and then once I got home, obviously spend time with my family and spend time getting things arranged at home and then usually hot back on Teoh, finish out any work that still needed to be done around seven or 8 p.m. So generally, uh, my hours were were fairly good. I definitely stayed busy. I'd say, you know, a 10 hour day is probably fairly typical. Um, things things changed pretty dramatically during the lockdowns with Cove it with everything that was going on with our business. We saw several of our clients get impacted pretty dramatically. A couple of them went out of business overnight. Some of them had to completely cease operations because they were in the travel and leisure space on. So because of that, it just presented a lot of unique challenges that we have based before. And so for pretty much march in April, it was pretty much all day, every day, probably 14 hour days on weekends as well. So because because the business was kind of thrown into a tough situation, it meant that myself and my two partners ended up having to spend quite quite a lot more time than we might have typically

for for me on what? One of the challenges and it's apart I really enjoy about the job is that it's always changing. Being ah leader in a growing company just means that there's there's always new challenges, and it can be frustrating at times because as soon as I get one challenge solved, we've grown past that point and there's a new set of challenges. Eso so it Ah, it can be frustrating at times, but it's also one of the things that I enjoy most about the business and so an example there would be back when we only had six people. Um, we had pretty much the entire company, all six people on every project together eso that had its own benefits. It meant that we were always working together. We got to know each other really well. We got to understand how to work with each other. Well, cause everybody has slightly different communication styles. Three drawbacks were that as we started growing, it was really hard for that same team to juggle lots of different clients, lots of different industries. And so to solve that challenge, what we ended up doing was making it Ah, change it so that instead of the entire company working on each client together, were partitioned into teams on DSO. We created two different teams, and at this point I think we have grown to about 12 people. We partitioned into two different teams and so on. Each team had some specialties, so that as clients came in the door, we could, uh, you know, specialize and break things apart and, uh, basically increased the amount of work we were able to get done. Then we have another problem as we continue to grow, and at this point we're probably at about 20 employees A Z. We continue to grow. We found that that team set up wasn't working so well anymore because if we had ah, person with a certain specialty on another team, we ended up having to borrow them for a particular project on and then sending them back. And it just started to kind of break our model. When it came to out locating people to projects, some people ended up getting burdened down with a lot more projects than they had availability for because of that set up. So we have to change the model again on said we changed it to special specialties, and we call them verticals. Eso. We have specialized verticals within the company, and a person belongs to a team dedicated to their specialty. And then they are assigned to a project on an individual basis. So gone are the days of project teams assigned together two different projects, and now we have it so that it's fully flexible. Everyone is assigned to a project on an individual basis of a totally customized project. Team is created for each individual client s. So far, this has been scaling fairly well. It makes it so that we can pay much more attention to the individual and the individuals. Workload as a poster, entire teams workload. It also makes projecting for hiring a little bit easier understanding when we can hire and when we need to hire. Um, but then it also is coming with its own set of challenges just because, as our company grows were at about 50 employees. Now some people don't know each other very well anymore, which is something that was really easy when you're small and so someone might be assigned to a project with a totally new group of people that have worked with yet, and that comes with its own set of challenges because they have to figure out how to communicate together. That person has to be caught up to speed on everything that's occurred on that project, and eso it definitely comes with its own set of challenges that we're still working on.