s o. I had an interesting path for sure. So I've always been a, uh you know, I guess it's OK to say, you know, geek as a kid, but spent my life with computers, so always had computers in the house. I was coding when I was 10 years old on DSO spent a lot of my time that that wasn't spent directly in school doing school stuff. I spent a lot of time on the computer. So when I branched into my first job, which was at Goldman Sachs, um, I was actually there as a help desk. Kind of helped us support person. So I did a center here, Um, so as a help that support person, I was the person that when you know, someone's Microsoft word flared up or, you know, they needed help within Excel Equation or something like that. I was there for that kind of stuff is well, is handling emergencies and things like that. But what I would do is, um I was at the equity research division at Goldman. So these are all the people who research stocks and decide what stocks are gonna go up and down the next day, etcetera. Or that that morning. Um, so I saw an opportunity there to build software in order to automate this, uh, this process. So, um, theme the time that it used to take from when an analyst was done with their their research to the time it was actually posted for public consumption and really golden clients. Consumption was usually it would round out to be an hour, an hour and a half because it had to go through several approval chains. People were running floppy disks around the floor. So I kind of saw that as an opportunity and decided I was going to build software around that night. I was fortunate to have a boss that let me try that. So I ended up building a system that turned that hour and a half to about 10 15 minutes. And from there it was just a commitment by Goldman at that point to say, Hey, this is obviously the right path. You know this again. It's 1992 93. So at the time, we were the first bank on the street to have this type of technology. Eventually, all of them had it, obviously, but that was my Goldman Sachs time. It was really about taking advantage of an opportunity because I had the ability to the free knowledge of coding. But also, it was an organization that allowed for that. So once, Um so I did that for about nine years, so my entire time was with Goldman Was about nine years when the dot com boom started happening. Um, everybody was leaving for dot coms, right? It was that, you know, the the golden opportunity of some company you're going to join, and they're gonna go public. And, you know, all of a sudden you're going to be, um, you know, billionaire be beyond your wildest dreams. And, of course, quickly, um, that became not the reality anymore. But basically what happened was I had gone thio. Um, I left Goldman had gone to a dot com that was owned by a big media company s O. They basically wanted the online version of all their brands to be built for the media company. So we start up a separate company, basically built it as if it was a start, A real startup. Then what happened is just like everybody else at the time, it suddenly became obvious that the dot com dream was not going to happen. You know, when the when the market started to take a turn and most companies were if they had parent companies, the parent companies were bringing their dot com efforts into the parent company. We're just running it like a cost center of the business. So the parent company, which was called Advanced, are the parent company over the dot com I was that brought us in, but also at that point, maybe CTO of the entire company. Um, so that was a whole new set of challenges. Um, because there you're talking about an old style company that had, ah lot of antiquated software platforms that needed to be upgraded, so that was a good six or seven years. At that point, I then became CEO of a company that was started by all the big brokers called the Market's com. We ended up selling that and, um, travel the world for a bit. And then I started at WebMD as the head of their engineering effort. Then I became their CTO on just a you know, a year and a half ago we sold WebMD

So, as a chief technology officer, you're responsible for several facets of how technology interacts with the business. Now there's a special carve out for if your business is based on technology, so I'll talk about that in a second. But just as a chief technology officer of any company, your chief goal is to make sure that technology and the things that you're working on, where you're spending your money, is aligned with what the business goals are, right, just as a general textbook type definition. What that means, though, is you somewhat have to do you use your technical background, but at a certain point you have tow, let go of some of it, and the higher up the chain you get, the more the higher percentage of a business orientation you kind of have to have. So, um, I'm just really in question here, So as far as that goes within a dot com type or a a company whose product is technology now, all of a sudden you're also responsible for the customer facing portion of that. And that brings on a whole new set of challenges when something can go wrong and revenue is impacted in a big way because of it. It changes how you approach things like that on. Do you become less of a concerned about just cost and you suddenly become more concerned about? Or do you see the value in heavy innovation because that can actually lead Thio more revenue?not. So this is I would even call a side priority. But stability, of course, stability of the environment is the basis of the whole thing. Um, then you come Thio You want to have a team in place that could respond to needs as flexibly as possible. So, um, you don't wanna have thio? Ideally, of course, this never happens. But ideally, you have a person for every project that someone could dream up. Of course, that never happens. Like I said, so all of a sudden, you responsible for prioritizing And that that would be the next level of responsibility is figuring out where toe where your engineering efforts, for example, should be spent where their best spent and making sure that everybody understands the cost profile on the benefit profile I remind were all over the place. I'm I'm late, worker. So I mean, going back to even my Goldman Sachs days. I would you know, there was my twenties, so I was able to do things like work till three in the morning and then come in at eight. But, you know, I I'm probably a little more hands on than most chief technology officer. So I probably spend more time in the office with my people. In that sense, um, but it's I would say that my average leaving time was probably eight or nine PM on figure. I'm getting in at nine, so that's that's an average call it eight o'clock average.

so I'm gonna leave aside. It is technology. Depending on what technology you're dealing with, you can that technology can introduce risk and challenges. Or it could be something that's pretty straightforward. And you know you're following a well tread path that doesn't really require too much heavy lifting. So technology aside, because that has its own nuances, that probably the biggest challenge is where people intersect with technology. Now, if you are anywhere within the technology organization, you have to worry about that. To me. I always say I've done many of the jobs within technology. The hardest job to me is the help desk because and I've been engineer for huge products and I've run. I've done network conversions and done operation type stuff, and those are the categories and technology. But help desk what you If you are developing an application and you have a bug, you can fix it. You have control over that. If you're on the operational side, you you forge your your existence on just making sure that the stability is there and you have lots of contacts of companies, etcetera. The help desk. You are the face of the entire technology group really, But you are the person that gets called when someone's mad. By the same token, you're also the person that has no control over. You know, how likely are you to get Microsoft to help you with a problem that the user has on our desktop? Not too likely. So it makes for a very difficult job. So again, that's where people intersect with technology. So on the engineering side, probably the biggest year. If you're writing software, the biggest problem you have is you're executing your writing, your building based on someone's opinion, right? Someone, whether it's a formal process of the hand you expect whether you're doing an actual development where they sit down with you in a stand up on bond. Explain some bit of functionality. However it is someone's communicated their vision. The problem is that you don't you're limited by how much information they actually put in there, and you can't expect anybody to put every detail they expect. So now you brush up against what's your experience with applications? How do you What do you think? I would say there's probably 20 micro decisions a developer mix every week. Eso those are decisions that they're never gonna ask about because they're too small and they probably have their own assumptions and built in ways they think this button should look or this text box should ask act. So, uh, in general, my approach with that stuff is, um not to be cliche about it, but to be is communicative and transparent as possible. So the mawr just taking engineering again as a as a as an example, the mawr, an engineer knows about what the goal of the project is, the better decisions they're going to make. And like I said, there's some decisions they're not gonna ask about because it's just not, You know, you wouldn't think you'd even need thio. But if they understand that for this particular application, you're actually not looking to maximize users you want and you don't wanna attract a lot of traffic, so you might approach it a little differently. As long as the person who's actually doing the coding understands that, then you're ahead ahead of the game. So that's probably the biggest thing is make sure that people are informed, um, and also that they're appreciated, right, so that when the work is done, everyone who is involved in a project should should understand the impact that they had