High Performance Database Consulting

About Me

I was born and raised in the Hudson Valley in upstate New York, near the beautiful Catskill Mountains. I wrote my first computer program when I was 13, and was soon taking local college classes and tutoring college students in software. I was pretty nerdy and managed to finish high school and get into MIT when I was 16. My degree focused on Management Information Systems.

After college I built a commercial voice-response product in C/Unix with its own high-level programming language and sold it to clients around the country. It was my first entrepreneurial venture.

I then worked at Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms for many years doing various kinds of database consulting, usually with Microsoft SQL Server. Among many projects during this time, I supported the bond trading desk at Bank of America, optimizing their database code by orders of magnitude.

For six years I worked as the Senior Database Architect for White Mountains Re, a $7 billion international reinsurance firm. I developed catastrophe modeling and portfolio optimization tools that were critical for running their business.

I then attempted a social welfare project of my own design – I started building ShareTell.net, a meta-IVR system to act as an alternative to the Internet for people in the third world. It was a good idea, but smartphones proliferated faster than expected.

My next big entrepreneurial project was TaxTrim.com, a database-intensive website that helps homeowners find out if they are over-assessed and build optimized tax grievances to reduce their property taxes. It currently has data on over 2 million homes.

In the last few years, I have continued my consulting work, building cloud data warehouses for both the ACLU and the National Suicide Hotline, among other projects.

I was born and raised in the Hudson Valley in upstate New York, near the beautiful Catskill Mountains. I wrote my first computer program when I was 13, and was soon taking local college classes and tutoring college students in software. I was pretty nerdy, and managed to finish high school and get into MIT when I was 16. My degree focused on Management Information Systems.

After college I built a commercial voice-response product in C/Unix with its own high-level programming language and sold it to clients around the country. It was my first entrepreneurial venture.

I then worked at Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms for many years doing various kinds of database consulting, usually with Microsoft SQL Server. Among many projects during this time, I supported the bond trading desk at Bank of America, optimizing their database code by orders of magnitude.

For six years I worked as the Senior Database Architect for White Mountains Re, a $7 billion international reinsurance firm. I developed catastrophe modeling and portfolio optimization tools that were critical for running their business.

I then attempted a social welfare project of my own design – I started building ShareTell.net, a meta-IVR system to act as an alternative to the Internet for people in the third world. It was a good idea, but smartphones proliferated faster than expected.

My next big entrepreneurial project was TaxTrim.com, a database-intensive website that helps homeowners find out if they are over-assessed and build optimized tax grievances to reduce their property taxes. It currently has data on over 2 million homes.

In the last few years, I have continued my consulting work, building cloud data warehouses for both the ACLU and the National Suicide Hotline, among other projects.