Pay Your Dues

I've known you for years, but I didn't realize until I was prepping for this interview that you are an engineer by training and you've also been a consultant at Bain. You've worked in investment banking as well. So when and how did you decide that your purpose in life was really something else entirely, to start a company and create an entirely new category in executive compensation data?

Yeah. As you mentioned, I studied engineering as an undergrad. Interestingly, I never actually worked as an engineer. Candidly, I didn't know what to major in. So I actually started off as liberal arts and transferred into the engineering school, as opposed the other way around where most engineers run out, but it was a great background. I was fortunate enough to work for Bain right out of school, then worked at a software company, got my MBA, spent six years on Wall Street, starting off in New York and then coming out here in 1997, I was roughly about 30. And I just realized working with a lot of entrepreneurs and saw how exciting it was to get businesses off the ground and wanted to give it a shot. And I saw an opportunity because I'd spent a lot of time working with SCC data. And saw there's got to be an opportunity to mine this and build a company around that. And 20 years later thankfully it's all worked out.