Date and place of birth: 23 January, 1951, New York City
Residence: New York City
Marital status: Married with two daughters
Education: B.S. in Economics, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania; JD, Emory School of Law
Career path: Started as a communications and entertainment lawyer for Viacom, Warner Amex and Multimedia; became head of Business Affairs at Viacom Entertainment; took a foray into the telco attempt to launch cable service in the mid-90’s at NYNEX (now Verizon); ran a Clayton, Dubilier & Rice portfolio company - Global Decisions Group - with market-leading subsidiaries in financial services (MCM) and energy consulting (CERA), then took on the challenge at Relegence of helping turn a great technology into a great business
Current posts: President & CEO, The Relegence Corporation

Q: What was your first job?
A: Sailing counsellor at a sleepaway camp in Maine. It taught me that we have an incredible environment that we have a responsibility of maintaining, that we do have the future of the next generation in our hands if we teach them correctly, and that we have the ability to harness vast, unseen resources to accomplish great things.

Q: Who is or was your mentor?
A: My father and grandfathers. They have taught me the power of empowering employees and leveraging that collective force for the betterment of the enterprise.

Q: Which business leaders do you most admire?
A: Steve Jobs and Dick Parsons. Jobs for his creative brilliance, foresight and ability to harness creative talent to achieve incredible accomplishments. Parsons for his leadership, diplomatic and motivational skills, and his talent in re-establishing the greatness of one of the best media companies out there.

Q: If you weren't in your current job, which company would you most like to lead?
A: Pixar. It is a company with creativity on steroids and internal energy in that environment is powerful.

Q: Do you read books on management theory? If so, which has influenced you the most?
A: I find biographies of great leaders to be as informative; Truman by David McCullough and The Power Broker by Robert Caro are two of the best that I have ever read.

Q: Which competitors do you benchmark your company's performance against?
A: We pride ourselves on being a unique disruptive technology that is changing the way financial services firms use information. There are many interesting companies out there, but no one can provide the breadth and depth of our service.

Q: What has been your best experience in business?
A: Building a great team at Relegence.

Q: What was your biggest mistake in business?
A: Underestimating the time it takes for large companies to make decisions.

Q: What keeps you awake at night?
A: Fear that the market will innovate quicker than we do. We are moving as fast as we can but there is always someone out there who is trying to figure out how to do what you do better, quicker and less expensively. Technological changes today force us to innovate the process of innovation.

Q: How do you relax?
A: With a young company, who gets to relax? When I do, it is playing with my one and five year-old daughters - they make me look at the world through a totally different, more refreshing, and constantly changing lens. In the few minutes I have left after that, biking, sailing and reading, especially history and biographies.

Q: What was the last gadget you bought?
A: IPod Nano (my wife bought it for me as a present at my request) - I can’t live without it.

Q: Favourite Web site
A: It’s hard to pick one, there are a lot of great ones out there. I find www.cnn.com good for news (although not as great as Relegence’s FirstTrack service for real-time alerting on breaking news!) and www.ebay.com and www.amazon.com because they give me a great window on the changing cultural behaviour and priorities of our generation.

Q: Desert island disc/book
A: Bookends - Simon and Garfunkel/ The Collected Poems of Robert Frost and John Adams by David McCullough. Songwriter, lyricist, poet, revolutionary and biographer par excellence!