Forged by Necessity: How Survival, Struggle, and Serendipity Made an Entrepreneur

A 30-year journey from actuary-in-training to entrepreneur—forged in necessity, fueled by grit, and guided by curiosity.

I never planned a single day of my career. My true schoolmaster has always been necessity. Whatever came, I did what I had to do.

Thirty years ago, I was in graduate school, buried in a thesis, and dreaming of a professorship like my father. Then life happened. My kindergartener daughter was dropped on my doorstep like little Annie out of a Dickens tale. In that instant, the ivory tower gave way to survival. I left academia behind and took my first “real job” at GE Capital Assurance as an Actuarial Programmer. They told me later I had beaten out sixty-five candidates.

Mathematics had always been in my blood—my father and grandfather were actuaries, and I'd passed several ASA exams myself. But my path took a strange turn. I began receiving desperate calls from around the country: loan calculations weren't balancing, commissions were at risk, money was on the line. After pouring over the math, I discovered the actuaries themselves had made errors in the formulas they'd submitted to state insurance commissioners. I reprogrammed the algorithms, fixed the calculations, and saved the day. My equations were re-filed officially by a credentialed actuary, but word spread. Within months, I was poached for double the salary and relocated to California.

For the first and only time in my corporate career, I had an actual office. The boss, a theoretical physicist, believed in extreme independence: food and problems went under the door, and code was expected to come out. It was there I first saw Delphi—glowing on a colleague's screen like fire in Prometheus' hand. “Too complicated for you,” the senior programmer sneered. That challenge lit a fuse.

Soon I was offered another job—again, double the salary—but only if I mastered Delphi and Object-Oriented Programming. “Lend me a computer for two weeks,” I told them. “If I can't cut it, fire me.” I locked myself in, devoured books, and emerged victorious. My code lived in their applications for years. That was the moment I learned to bet on myself.

But Silicon Valley dreams often walk hand-in-hand with nightmares. At one startup, I realized too late that the company was a mob front for laundering money. Employees went unpaid. I confronted the bald-headed boss himself and demanded my check. Miraculously, I got it—only to discover at the bank that the account was drained by a hungrier soul who got there first. I gamed the system, hustling ATMs for four days until I scraped together what I could. Persona non grata at Wells Fargo to this day, I walked away broke but wiser.

God's Providence and His Grace to grant me grit carried me forward. I wrote the world's first online airline reservation system for twin millionaire engineers. I slept in an office with a sofa bed, showered at the gym, and stowed my belongings in sea containers next to a post office they owned. When that venture collapsed in scandal, I jumped to Media Services in Hollywood and built groundbreaking film scheduling and budgeting software. At a Delphi user group, I demoed a drag-and-drop storyboard component I'd written, and they elected me Vice President on the spot. Suddenly, I was in the inner circle of elite consultants.

By 1998, I was done with cubicles. With a retroactive raise in my pocket and encouragement from my peers, I launched TaylorMade Software. My office was a borrowed computer; my daughter slept in a bag under my desk while I coded at night. I hustled—Vegas by day, Los Angeles by weekend—learning Oracle from scratch, building enterprise systems on faith and adrenaline. Clients multiplied: Las Vegas, ECCU, CB Richard Ellis. I was airborne.

Since then, I've reinvented myself again and again: actuary to programmer, BASIC to Delphi, Delphi to Java, mainframe to Oracle, consulting to cloud. Thirty years gone in a blink. What I know now is this: the real prize is not knowledge itself, but knowing how to learn, adapt, and solve.

Life has given me rugby, polo, surfing, scuba, skiing, travel—and countless puzzles solved at 3AM under pressure. It has been good. For the young dreamers: ignore the naysayers. Let their doubts fuel you. Stay curious. Stay golden 'Ponyboy'. Bet on yourself. And never, ever quit.