Entrepreneur, World Traveler, Racecar pilot

If you can call what I do here “writing”, then I am your author. You can check my stats on my LinkedIn profile. If you want to contact me, you can reach me at brian@vfive.com.

Since the 6th grade when classmate Joe Layman bought freeze-dried ice cream at a pre-Costco wholesale store and sold it at a 400% markup, I’ve been an entrepreneur. My parents might say it started when I was 7, playing with my Tonka trucks and overseeing the “development of a subdivision” in the garden. After college I started, ran and sold an internet consultancy and today I am running my second start-up, Pukka Software. We run an event registration and management tool for motorsport event organizers. I love it.

Motorsports, specifically racing cars, is my second passion. There are few things as exciting as going door to door with a competitor (or 10) at more than 100mph around a twisty road course. It turns out, I’m pretty decent at it. I’m currently racing with the SCCA in the ultra-competitive San Francisco Region Spec Miata series. An average weekend sees 50+ equally prepared miatas duking it out for the win.

My third (and competing) passion is travel. I’ve spent a fair amount of time around Europe in the past 4 years on a couple of trips, one of them 4 and a half months long. This year I completed a 7-month round-the-world trip with my girlfriend, Jennifer. If I didn’t love racing so much, I’m pretty sure I would already live abroad somewhere exploring the culture and cuisine of a foreign country.

I also spend a lot of time reading. My girlfriend laughs that I don’t read “for pleasure” because I’ve always got the latest business book in hand. In the not so distant past that has included titles like Freakonomics, Winning Friends & Influencing People, The Tipping Point and Getting Things Done.

I’m competitive. I hate losing. Even to my younger brother when he used to cheat at miniature golf. Don’t think I forgot Steven!

Lastly, I love to learn. I think this is the trait that drives all my interests and why I went to college for mechanical engineering. I like to know how things work and then improve them. This has landed me in trouble; my dad will recall how I started mowing the lawn in concentric rings (against his explicit orders) because “it saves time turning around at each end of straight lines”.

The audience for this blog is, really, me. I write to keep track of things I’ve done mostly for future reference. I also think my friends, family and a few colleagues might be interested. I tend to spend a lot of time figuring things out and I hope that it might be helpful to someone else. You know, the “don’t reinvent the wheel” thing.

I don’t think you can write an “about me” page without it either sounding like a personal ad or coming off cheesy. If I’m lucky, I’ll have succeeded in doing both.