I hope you’ll indulge me for a minute so I can share some exciting personal news.

I’m joining a brand new startup company as CEO.

Here’s a little bit of the story about how it happened.

My 20-Year Career at Age 32

I’ve always had the good fortune to work with entrepreneurial companies – from my dad’s distribution business where I started packing boxes in the back room at age twelve, to a web consulting firm I sold, to a business ops software company that built a great team and a great product, but ultimately didn’t get funded.

All in all, the good has always outweighed the bad. There’s just nothing like being a part of limitless opportunity – and that’s what the American system of entrepreneurial capitalism is all about.

During the last four years, I’ve spent most of my time leading global product development for a financial services firm with operations in the San Francisco Bay Area and Chicago. That gave me the chance to broaden my experience with consumer marketing and international. It’s been a great privilege to work with an incredible team of people there.

And now, that chapter is coming to a close and a new chapter is opening.

For the last fifteen years, I’ve had a front row seat to watch technology – and the web – change the world and remake how we go about our daily lives.

When I started messing around with this stuff in the late 1980s, “twitter” was something that only birds did and “facebook” was what happened when you fell asleep while reading. We didn’t have Kindles or iPhones. (Heck, we didn’t even have cell phones – I remember when my dad had a pager so we could make him stop at a pay phone and call us!)

The New Opportunity

As I’ve spent the last four years building technology products and interacting with some of the world’s most brilliant market traders, it’s been fascinating to watch how they all deal with risk. Every economic decision we make is motivated by one of two things: seeking opportunity, or avoiding pain.

If you think about it, how we see the world through that lens of risk is very personal to each of us – you might even say it’s like a fingerprint. And yet it also changes over time. Our own job, our finances, national security, world events and the financial markets cause us to constantly shift a little bit closer to seeking opportunity, or a little bit closer to avoiding pain.

Earlier this year, I was presented with a fascinating opportunity. There’s some incredible technology that can actually capture that “risk fingerprint” from each of us, and let us use it to make better risk/reward decisions. It’s groundbreaking stuff, and nobody has ever tried to do this quite the same way before.

The new company is called Riskalyze. I’m joining the company as CEO on March 1.

We’re going to take that raw technology and transform it into a set of products that will fundamentally change how the world makes risk/reward decisions.

I’m incredibly excited about the challenge that lies ahead. For one thing, you’ll be hearing more from me on business and technology topics I haven’t been able to write about before. (Financial Services is a highly regulated industry, so corporate policies prevented me from writing much about it.) I’ll be sharing a lot about what we’re doing as our story unfolds.

In fact, I’m hoping the “regulars” who follow this blog – everyone from friends and colleagues in business, to folks at Sierra College, to people in the orphan care and adoption community – will be intrigued enough to try this out when it’s ready. (If that’s you, go ahead and comment on this post, and I’ll make sure you get a “Backstage Pass” to check it out before it launches!)

I had to hold this post until I could meet with my incredible staff and share this news with them personally. It’s been a privilege to lead them for four years. It’s also tough to leave an incredible boss, who taught me a lot and gave me all the support that I needed to be successful. I trusted her with my career for those four years and she never let me down. I owe her a debt of gratitude.

So there you have it – one chapter closes, and another one begins.

I can’t wait to get started.