I’ve been in the tech industry for some time. While in the eighth grade, my dad bought me a computer and just left it on my desk. So I started to figure it out. And yes, I became obsessed with this machine. Then when I was a freshman in high school, I started to code and sold some of my programs to magazines (in the early 1980s, these publications had listings of code for readers to type in!) From all this, I knew I wanted to be a part of the tech world.

Although, it was not until college that I started my first business. You see, I was fairly bad at taking exams. What to do? Well, I created software for exam preparation. I would sell this to a national provider of bar exam preparation. The business would then go on to grow, as we added more and more exams.

But the biggest venture of mine was launched in 1997. It was Hypermart.net. Think of it as kind of a first-generation Shopify. From the start, the growth was strong and we would sell the company to InfoSpace.com.

In the meantime, I have always been writing, such as for Forbes.com, Bloomberg.com, Kiplinger and BusinessWeek. I have also written a variety of books, mostly on tech and finance. My latest include Artificial Intelligence Basics: A Non-Technical Introduction and The Robotic Process Automation Handbook: A Guide to Implementing RPA Systems.

As of now, I’m an advisor to some awesome startups.