I started in a radio booth in the Saudi desert

On the air

The Army trained me as a broadcast journalist at the Defense Information School at Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana. My first television news story aired on the American Forces Korea Network on Valentine's Day, 1989. I was 18.

In the first week of January 1991 I arrived in Saudi Arabia for Desert Shield and was on the air by my second day, with no time for training. I ran the morning show for the Armed Forces Desert Network out of a Marine base near Al Jubayl. When Kuwait was liberated, I was the first broadcaster to congratulate the troops in southern Kuwait. After the cease-fire I moved to Dhahran, which was becoming the network's headquarters, as station news director.

His shows were always tight and in format. [He] was innovative and many of his ideas were considered in the programming and operation of the network.

Captain Robert D. Close, Regional Officer in Charge, Armed Forces Desert Network, June 1991

Learning to build

The GI Bill and the Army College Fund paid for degrees in public relations and history at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. While I was in school I was already building on the early internet: CraftNet Village, an online home for the crafting community, plus websites for a number of companies in the craft business. Right after graduation I joined the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel to help build the website for the largest newspaper in Wisconsin.

Strong Capital Management recruited me from the paper, and I've never left financial services since. At Strong I wrote code for an early online brokerage platform and the firm's mutual fund site. Tucker Anthony Sutro brought me to Denver, where I led development of one of the first personalized online research sites in capital markets. When Royal Bank of Canada bought the firm in 2001, merged it into RBC Dain Rauscher and asked me to move to Minneapolis, I took my chances and stayed in Denver. In 2002 I moved into product at Comprehensive Software Systems, running its front office suite for brokerages.

Employee number one

I was Aite Group's first full-time employee, joining when it was a small startup analyst firm. Over eight years I built and ran its institutional securities research practice as the firm grew around it. Covering trading technology and market data meant spending my days with exchanges, vendors and banks, learning how each of them decides what to build and buy. The more I provided advice and guidance to support other people's products, the more I wanted to return to building my own.

Building the products I'd written about

I left research to build, though not where I planned. I had told the person who became my boss at Nasdaq that I was leaving Aite for a market data feed handler company. They were in a car at the time, put me on hold to talk to someone else in the car, then came back on and asked me to come to NASDAQ OMX instead. There I led global business development and ISV partnerships for FinQloud, a cloud platform for financial firms built on Amazon Web Services and one of the first of its kind.

I founded MarketsTech, an advisory firm that helped exchanges, vendors, startups and private equity investors with product strategy and due diligence. Then CME Group hired me to run product for its data services business, where we put the exchange's real-time data on Google Cloud.

An industry voice inside a cloud provider

In 2020 I joined AWS to build the company's first industry product organization, for financial services. It has two halves: a product team that brings financial services customers' needs to the AWS service teams, and the Technical Field Community, a global network of financial services specialists in 25 countries. I own both, and the community takes a large share of my time. I'm also AWS's executive sponsor for FINOS.