Tell us about your role and journey into technology. What made you start Fluency?I was a mechanical engineering student at Clarkson University when I got my first computer. Knowing basically nothing about computers, after using it for about a day, I had broken it and I couldn’t get it to boot up. I was worried about how much it was going to cost me to fix it, so I started reading. I read cover to cover the MS-DOS manuals and the Windows manuals. When I finally put those down, I felt pretty comfortable doing most anything on that computer after that.
That got me my start with computing, and wherever I went after that, I ended up modernizing processes with computers, regardless of the domain.
Where technology transitioned from simply an “added benefit” to something I really wanted to do as a career was when I was designing algorithms for mechanical failure prediction/prevention on helicopters. So much of it had to be done through software that simply didn’t exist at the time, and I believed that it was my calling to create that software so that the technical community, including myself, could work collaboratively on building and productizing those algorithms.
I got into web technology and advertising systems in 2007 when I joined Dealer.com. It provided a wonderful culture to disrupt the norm, explore what’s possible, and move fast. I had fallen in love with “big data” before it had a name, and Dealer.com brought me to a place where I had huge data sources. I was using my mathematical background and knowledge of computer systems to solve some pretty interesting problems.Read the full interview here...
