Back in 1983, I started in the mail room at Charles Schwab in Century City, California. Before that I worked in Sears key booth and at Long John Silvers, both in Grand Rapids, Michigan. My first computer was a TS1000. Not knowing what to do with it, I typed in “Hello, Hal.” Hal did not answer back.

While at the University of Iowa I created a massive spreadsheet to track my running, racing, sleep and overall health. That spreadsheet eventually became a software package called RunningCounts, which launched in 1990. Two years later, several world class runners used RunningCounts to train for the 1992 Olympic games in Barcelona.

In 1996 I was hired to turn around a failing software company called Decisionmark. Instead of turning it around, we scrapped everything they’d built and built a new, Internet-based technology, called Geneva. While I didn’t know it at the time, we’d invented what is now known as geo-fencing. Geneva led to TitanTV.com, the first-ever web-based EPG/DVR and then antennaweb.org, a tool that helped millions of consumers make the transition from analog to digital television.

In 2009, after selling Decisionmark, I founded Syncbak. I spent the next year off the grid working on the technology, patents, funding and talking with broadcasters about what has come to be known as OTT, or over-the-top. Today, ten years later, we are the leader in live local OTT.