BACKGROUND
Where the thinking
came from.
I spent two decades on the institutional side of finance. I started as a mortgage analyst at Bank of America in 2007, working eighteen-hour days, six days a week, analyzing pools of mortgage loans. Believe it or not, that's a dream job, because of the opportunities it opens. There were twelve of us in that analyst class. Eighteen months later I was the only one left. From there I became a trader, with over a billion dollars of the bank's own money to put to work. After that I started a similar trading platform at Stifel, and then ran multi-billion-dollar mortgage portfolios at an operating company, buying them, hedging them, selling them.
That probably doesn't mean much. What it boils down to is raising, moving around, and managing large sums of money for clients and banks. It plays a critical role in underpinning a lot of the financial system, from things like mortgage rates to the mutual funds you hold in your IRA or 401k.
None of it was a straight line. The two big acquisitions along the way, Countrywide and then Merrill Lynch, each brought layoffs and displacements. Each time I reinvented: different assets, producing money in different ways, managing risk, building technology on the fly to make my job easier. I have never had a technology job, but I taught myself how to code, run databases, and build complex predictive models. Things we actually had a technology team for, but I needed things fast. I learned to do the jobs of several different people at once, because the alternative was not having a job at all.
Then our first child was born, and the calculus changed. I wanted to be home more, and I wanted to put what I had learned to work on something more direct than a balance sheet. The job was always the same anyway: take something genuinely complicated, understand what actually drives it, and translate that into one clear picture a decision-maker can act on. That muscle is what I now apply to dental practices.
