“Success is not final; failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” – Winston Churchill
Let me make it abundantly clear. Andrew is whip smarter than the four of us combined. With two rounds at Harvard and a stint at Oxford in between, our academic credentials pale by comparison.
But, we knew we might have our guy when we learned that he cut his teeth picking banjo and hacking processors. A little digging and we came to learn that Andrew, despite growing up in the one-traffic-light town of Signal Mountain, Tennessee, was the computer nerd on his block. While he had an illustrious collection early and mid 90s religious software, he cut his ten year-old coding teeth on a Gateway 2000, slowing the Oregon Trail game down with a sleep commands to let the oxen rest from the relentless 75 mhz processor. Little did he know that he would actually follow that trail out West one day. He’s had the luxury of upgrading to 2.6 ghz in the meantime, but sadly an ox would know better than him how to modify the processor speed.
What got Andrew to leave an early banking career was his techie side and he joined a consumer bio-sensory startup running product development. He also started an eye tracking and market research company. Simultaneously, he started doing double duty as a Harvard MBA candidate. That’s where he really zeroed in on entrepreneurship and venture capital.
Andrew discovered Founders Circle in its very early days, but was sceptical from a mentor advising him that secondaries were a “bad neighborhood”. I think we did a pretty effective job of explaining to him how we were helping clean up the neighborhood.
by Ken Loveless
