I feel fortunate to have found passions as a child that helped shape how I‘ve approached things my entire life: sports (particularly tennis and basketball) and computer programming.Tennis taught me perseverance, to trust my instincts and make decisions. Basketball taught me about teamwork and the benefits of building a team to fill in the gaps of my knowledge and complement my skills. Especially at the college level, sports made me realize the amount of commitment and effort that was required to excel. Programming taught logic and critical thinking and I learned how computers could do routine and complex tasks, eliminating the need for people to do them. I went from hobby programming as a child to a 16-year-old selling my software in stores around the world while providing downloads via bulletin boards. It was clear to me that the internet would be our future and a platform for selling software and more. There were very few hosting companies at the time and all of them had various security vulnerabilities including access to customers’ sites, data and credit card information. When I brought these issues up, many of these hosts asked me to fix their issues or develop management software for them. Then it hit me: “Why not just host sites myself?” So, I built a hosting company that focused on the needs of software developers.Perseverance helped me build one of the largest Windows hosting companies in the world, CrystalTech, while working 100+ hour weeks taking support calls and spinning up servers. Logic, critical thinking and my programming skill helped build the first web-based management system for the hosting industry, automating a significant amount of the business and reducing staffing requirements compared to our competitors, making the company extremely profitable. I eventually sold CrystalTech to a publicly traded company.While running CrystalTech I also started SmarterTools with a focus on creating products that replaced the industry-leading email servers, web analytics and help desks that we used. Eventually, these products would be used by most Windows hosting companies around the world. SmarterTools has since branched beyond just the hosting industry and our products are used by businesses across numerous industries. I’m proud to say we have over 15,000,000 users in over 120 different countries. I continue to see problems and try to fix them through code, which has led to starting a number of businesses over the years. With each business, whether they succeed or fail, I continue to learn.