Description: A weekly financial podcast for professional finance, high net worth individuals, and other sophisticated investors
financial news (159) macro economics (4) financial podcast (2) macro investing (2) macro investment strategy (2)
Erik Townsend is a retired software entrepreneur turned hedge fund manager. Throughout his career, Erik has capitalized on his ability to understand complex systems and anticipate paradigm shifts far in advance of the mainstream. A teenage computer protégé, he spent most of his high school years at MIT's Artificial Intelligence laboratory, where he taught himself several computer programming languages. Erik became an independent software development and design consultant to Digital Corporation's manufacturi
From his experience at MIT, Erik recognized that the IT industry's failure to embrace distributed computing translated to an exceptional entrepreneurial opportunity. At age 21, Erik committed himself to developing and commercializing distributed application software technologies he was first exposed to at MIT in the late '70s. By the mid-1980s, Erik had invented an approach to distributed system design that is now widely known as Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). After applying SOA concepts initially at
By 1998, Erik had grown The Cushing Group to 35 employees, $10mm annual revenues, and an exceptional 28% net operating income. The Cushing Group was well on its way to becoming the premier authority on SOA, and many expected the company to go public after a few more years. But Erik recognized that valuations for IT Service companies were ridiculously high at the time, and that an exit through acquisition was more prudent than waiting for an IPO in a market where Erik was convinced a bubble was forming.