I grew up in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. You could say that entrepreneurship runs in my veins — my grandfather (who only has an 8th grade education) convinced his mother to mortgage the family farm to start a motel, which grew into a restaurant, and is now a family-run company, Bird-in-Hand Corp., with a bakery, multiple hotels, restaurants, deli, etc. Even my mom, who would never say she’s an entrepreneur, ran her own mediation consulting business called Educational Mediation Services for 10 years.

I went to college at Goshen College in Goshen, Indiana, majoring in business (until I dropped it because I couldn’t take the theory classes–I liked accounting and econ and the like, but I’m a practical learner and having had no management experience, reading about management drove me nuts) and computer science.

Over my college years, I interned/worked in Silicon Valley (right at the height of the boom at a little company called Transmeta) and in Charlottesville, Virginia and D.C. for a startup called M-CAM, Inc. (who has somewhat single-handedly transformed the way the intellectual property market thinks about itself).

RedPost inc. is my third company. I started one right out of college, Everblue Media, LLC, that grossed over $200k a year within 3 years. And then my business partner (Mindy Schlegel) and I amicably decided to go our separate ways (she’s now a partner at LightSky, a web design firm) so we sold Everblue and I started a one-man consulting company, Enovent, where I did everything from video production to programming to patent analysis.

Elkhart County is a much more interesting place than you’d expect, and over the past few years I’ve been involved in organizations like the Technology Council, New World Arts, and the Michiana Mennonite Relief Sale.

I had good intentions of going to Notre Dame’s MBA program, and got accepted for the session beginning the summer of 2006, but just couldn’t seem to do it.

In the spring of 2006, a sweet job involving technology and economic development in a 5 county region started to open up for me — I even got to help write the job description. But funding was an issue and so I continued to wait for the job and keep busy with my consulting work for the next several months.

Finally in November, what I’d been waiting for for over 6 months materialized: a job, with benefits, a regular salary (!), paid vacation (!!). My life of self-employed instability was about to end…

Except that about a month prior I had started tinkering around with a prototye in my garage of a simplified digital poster (something I had toyed with 2 years earlier but LCD prices were way too high) that would cheaply and efficiently display arts events posters around the community…the idea kept growing on me…and then, the day after I had a job offer for the first time in 4 years or so (and a good one at that!), I turned down the job and decided to start RedPost.

So here I am.