Um, okay, thanks. Thanks for inviting me. And thanks for the really good question. Um, sometimes people, uh, go to school to learn a particular discipline. And that discipline provides a path to some particular job function in the real world, as they say. Um, I did not pursue it that way. I had specific interests in science and technology and music, and I pursued those interests. Eso I wound up majoring in physics and mathematics on, um, and also music composition. So I pursued the interest that I enjoyed. Um, and then I embarked on a career that began in teaching quite a long time ago, on and on. Then, after a few years of teaching, um, I joined a company that could leverage my problems abilities. So really, the way this proceeded waas that as I was teaching, I learned about what I felt I was good at. Not particularly like a job function, but a personality trait. Or, you know, things that I like to do. So I was good at problem solving in school. Eso I persist. Pursuit required complex problem solved. So they were operational in nature originally. So I round up working for a West German media company, solving operational problems that involved technology that through a job that was more time oriented,So s so. I continued along the path I worked for Bertelsmann for nine years, uh, up to vice president of operations. Then I joined Metropolitan Life Insurance as a vice president of customer service automation Technologies. I did that for two years and then began toe work for LexisNexis in mergers and acquisitions. And I wound up doing that first for nine years as well. So the emergence and acquisitions role was very important to my career because it introduced me to all kind of the financial side of business. It introduced me to strategic decision making in business while it continued toe leverage, my capabilities to understand technology rationalized technology, make things more efficient and so forth. So after doing that for nine years, that sort of led into digital transformation roles. So in 2011Thio to transform their i t world. They descend the world right? Eso I did that for three years. Closed 22 out of 30 days Centers consolidated. Seven different I T functions into a single shared service created a virtual ization, and at the time it was a pre cloud platform. It's prior to cloud engineering, but it was just before that. And then my subsequent job waas uh, I was the CEO and CSO at ancestry dot com was also the chief digital officer. And there i I That was the culmination of all of my experiences I had re engineer the technology groups begins a leverage cloud. I mean, everything that I've been involved in is all about getting businesses to the next level, something that they're not experienced in then helping them on the journey to get there. And the journey involves cultural changes. Technology changes, process changes. Um, skill set changes, sometimes personnel changes, I would say more often than not, it's really not about changing people. It's about opening up the culture so that it is more accepting of innovation. So since then, since ancestry, I've done to startups. I'm on my third now Uh, and in each of those, I've played two roles. I've been a principal, a zoo, a part investor, and then also as a market growth or transformational person. So my current role with Hammers Face, for example, um, is that I'm a field chief technology officer, which is it's kind of code for working with customers to help them adopt new technologies that gets them into a new operating models to, you know, in, you know, in complex times so very exciting. I've Oh, I'm always been involved in change and and sometimes complicated. And sometimes people aren't happy all the time going through the changes. Uh, but a number of my employees have gone on to become more senior people and in other businesses. Eso I'm very proud of that. Um eso I've enjoyed. I've enjoyed that journey. So

So I have two primary responsibilities. UM one is to enable customers or find customers and enable them right? And the second is to take their requirements and work back with the engineering and development teams to look forward to build product and plan to deliver features and functions that are going to be needed in the marketplace. So it's it's part solve problems for customers today as well as begin to forecast. Where are these customers going to be going in the future and what what needs and demands what they have and then bringing those requirements back into engineering So they feed the pipeline of capabilities so that hammer space, uh, can deliver on those needs when when the market needs them. So that's kind of the the the equal. Uh, it's kind of a two sided responsibility.um the top three priorities is, uh, increased market share for hammer space. That means acquire MAWR customers. You either require them by finding them in the in the in the in the field, where there they don't know that they need you and you convince them that you do. And then you you get them to use your technology or by acquiring them away from other competitors, convinced them that our technology is more useful. It's better for them. It's cheaper, whatever the benefits happen to be to move them away. Eso its market share? Uh, it's a revenue, and it's product of a product enrichment. So those are the three priorities gain market share that's acquire customers. Third, is generate more revenue. Um, and that's interesting because those things don't necessarily have to go together. You can acquire customers without increasing revenue, but you can't increase revenue unless you begin to acquire more customers. And then the last. The third of the of the triumphant is to take all that stuff I said before about what we learned from customers and what their needs will be to keep the cycle of innovation going within the product. So we're already to deliver what's needed when the time comes. And then what was sort of the hours like, um Oh, well, I'm, uh so I'm older than most of the clientele or personnel like college students or young people. Eso I went through a period of time where I had to balance my career and family responsibilities. Um, I'm older now, so my our Children are grown and they moved out. So, you know, when I was an operational manager, I would still be on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But you What you do is you teach your organization how to deal with most everything that you could possibly teach them so that you're not actually involved most of the time, even though I'd be responsible. Um, now, now it's I try to block it, too, you know, 10 hour days, 12 hour days. But I don't limit it two weekends. I mean to weekdays. I work on Saturdays and Sundays as well. Um, but but I always am cognizant of blending my family life and, uh, s so that I can, uh, meet the needs that the family has. Well, but I do. I do work a lot

Mm. Okay, so in a job in a startup startup jobs are much different than corporate jobs. Um, so I will talk about the startup one, because that's the job I'm in right now. Um, the start of the complexities of a startup job. Um are that you don't know what you don't know, really. And you're not sure what we're going to be good at, right? As you join a startup, you don't know what the level of expertise is. Everybody around you. But you know that those three things that I mentioned before are there. You have to gain customers. You have, You have to have to make money, and you have to make the product better. So what I do is I keep those three principles in my head all the time and so that I'm focusing my attention on that. All the work that I do must be must be pointed to solving one of those three problems and not get distracted into, you know, social things. Meaning, you know, you know, organizational kind of nonsense about who's talking about whom gossip and stuff like that. I focus on delivering right as an operational person. You train yourself to focus on the end result. So the end result is those three things. So I'm able to clear my mind and clear my desk from other issues. So the major challenges are, you know, you get all these problems from everywhere, right? We don't know how to do this. We don't know how to do that, right? Well, yeah. And the start up, lots of things are unknown. So the first thing is to narrow the focus into the things that are critically important. Right? So you can draw, You know, what approaches did I use? Well, I use a theory of concentric circles in the middle. In the center circle, I put what are the three things or the four things? Whatever number it iss of critical things that I must focus on, right. And then there are secondary things or things that I might need to use or to have to get those things done and they go in the second circle. And then the third circle might be, well, things great or if I had money, I go to this right. What are the peripheral things? Right? This allows me to focus that I don't allow myself to distract. Distracted by the outer rings of the concentric circles. I just focus on the central one. And then if I can't do something that's in the center and I need something, I go to the outside the outer circle. When I pull it in, I get this test right. Eso approaches are to think both very deeply and precisely about your outcomes at the same time as you're looking at the big picture. Okay? And for a student that will require bouncing back and forth, right, focus on three things, and then then you have to say, it's OK, let me step back and think about the big picture. After doing this for 30 years, you don't have to switch back and forth. You can keep both those things in your head all the time, and then you're just you're just switching all the time to solve those problems. Um, so I I, um Although it sounds silly, I like lists. I'm a visual learner. Uh, so, uh and I'm older than most of your students, so I actually don't really work well within systems where all the data and information is hidden in buckets that I can't see, so I tend to wanna have things out in front of me. So my advice to your users are and your students are you. You should learn to operate the way it's most efficient for for the way you intuitively think, right? If you're a visual learner, then even though it's not technological, you may want little index cards on the wall because that's visual that's actually in your face, right? I mean, I have a stack of folders here on my desk. I have All of these folders are in my email system there also in these other tools, like club spot and marketing tools and CRM systems. But they're not visible to me all the time, So I forget things I didn't I don't follow appropriately. I just It's not intuitively for me to work that way, so I have 25 file folders on my desk where I keep my print things out. I put him in the file folders, and then I could go through them and I It's just it works for me. So, you know, just be don't be constrained by whatever systems or things that companies have that that they tell you this is the way we do this, right? In order for you to be successful, you have to do what helps you be successful in the way that you want to learn and deal with information, okay?