About

Nerd?  Guilty.

It probably started in 1978 in the 8th grade at Boston Latin School when I learned to program in FORTRAN on punch cards on an old IBM 1130 minicomputer.  I was fascinated by the prospect of being able to figure out how to make this computer do my bidding.  I continued to fan the flames of geekdom by meeting friends to write simple games on a TRS-80 – and later when my dad bought us an Apple II+ at home.

I was always a little bit of an outlier among the geeks, kind of like Anthony Michael Hall’s “Farmer Ted” character in Sixteen candles.  I probably thought I was a little cooler than my nerd-reality.

I went on to get a double major in Physics and Computer Science (of course) at Boston College and realized for the first time that I wasn’t gifted enough to be a physicist.  At that point, I decided that I could be the dumbest physicist or the smartest marketing guy – and chose the latter.  (It didn’t take me too long to figure out that I wasn’t the smartest marketing guy either…)

I’ve had the opportunity to run marketing for small (<$10M), medium ($500M) and large ($2B) companies and realized that my inner nerd was becoming more and more important as the craft of marketing became more deeply fused with technology.

This site is an example of what we should be doing as marketing professionals these days – getting our hands dirty setting up a website, writing, and creating.