- I always loved computers, but I didn’t associate as a Designer until High School. I grew up in a very small town and we only had dial up internet, but I had an excellent communications teacher, Tracy Wainwright who taught English, Yearbook, Advanced Comm (Morning News) and Newspaper. I wasn’t a fan of English, but I loved Yearbook and Advanced Comm. It was in her Yearbook class that I began using Adobe Photoshop, InDesign & Illustrator.
- I got pretty decent in those and started creating my own form of awful high school digital art and told my Mom and I wanted to go to art school. She talked me out if it and convinced me to go to business school for Marketing. Effectively the same field but from the opposite end of the table.
- While in college I worked in a local print shop and that was where I actually got good with the Adobe suite. One of our largest customers at the print shop was Virginia Women’s Center, the main OBGYN group in Richmond. They would constantly order business cards and all of the cards followed a standard template.
- The marketing lead would send us the information for the business card and we would update the business card and send them a proof. They would approve it and then we would print it.
- I found myself spending so much time just doing this process, so I decided I would see if I could automate this. This was my path to engineering.
- I wrote a web application where they could add their employee roster and the information for the business card and a script in InDesign that could talk to that API ingest that information to XML and apply that XML to the template.
- Fast forward a few years. I finish my MBA…
- After finishing my Master’s program, I moved from Richmond, VA to DC to be involved in the startup scene. I was involved in a startup at the 1776 Incubator in DC. That’s how I met David Fairbrothers, Dorsata CEO. One evening when my first startup was coming to a close I had David show me what he and Greg Herrington were planning for Dorsata.
- We saw all of these exciting apps being built for consumer use cases, but healthcare was not part of this. Why could we have these highly polished workflows for posting what we ate for dinner, but Doctors are forced to use what is essentially a Microsoft Access Database for managing the care of 1000’s of people. It just seemed so backwards. The opportunity to make an impact here was to just so high.
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