As you will see in this post, life is full of chance.  The reasons I am in Iowa, how I met my business partner, and other choices are all fairly random.  What you must have below all that is a passion about something and a drive to succeed.  I like to believe if my current story wasn’t my story, based on different choices, I would still be having a nice life somewhere – just different.  But we’ll leave those discussions to shows like LOST to solve…

After some interest in computers and writing some simple programs on my Atari 800 XL, I had the good fortune to have a wonderful computer teacher in high school.  And, Jack McGrath, formerly of Broomfield HIgh School, if I can ever find you I owe you dinner – and a lot more.  He was one of those great teachers that opened your eyes to something and let you explore.  After that experience I went to the University of Colorado and majored in Business with a double focus on Management Information Systems and Marketing.  I was interested in both disciplines and still am to this day.  When I graduated end of the summer, I interviewed with EDS, the #1 company in the industry, got hired and was ready to go and work in Boulder, Colorado.  Unfortunately, or maybe not as it turns out, they did not have openings locally and needed me to move to – Iowa.  Enter the random part – I would never have moved to Iowa on my own, but the young lady I was dating at the time had family in Iowa so was willing to go on the journey with me.  That worked out too, by the way. Thank you, Lora

Once in Iowa, I worked at EDS for several years and formed some great relationships along the way.  It was also a wonderful chance to see the good and bad of working at a large organization.  But due to some lack of opportunities and what I felt was some mismanagement of the young hires there, I chose to look for a new job.  I explored contract programming but that seemed risky to me at the time.  And then another opportunity came along.  At EDS I had met my future partner, Stephen Fry, who had since gone back to a small, fire and safety exporting company.  He reached out and asked if I could help them develop a customer management database.  I took that opportunity part-time and we both soon realized there was more to do in bringing a database, the emerging idea of web sites, and general technology know-how to a small business.  So, I joined that small company and handled all things technical.

This was a wonderful complimentary experience to working at a large company and I truly enjoyed this more – but still glad to have experienced both.  After a year or so we did realize that I was not going to be needed on a daily basis, however, as there was simply not the volume of work.  We began to imagine, however, that many companies of similar size likely did not have a database, web site, etc. so perhaps we could provide those services.  So, we put $1,000 in a bank account, came up with the name Spindustry - more on that later – and off we went.