Official Bio

 

Nick is a Director at PricewaterhouseCoopers, responsible for several security-related strategic vendor alliances in North America, including Symantec, Computer Associates, Aveksa and Sailpoint.  Nick is also Co-Founder and President of Graham's Foundation, founded in 2009, in honor of his son, Graham.  The foundation provides care packages to parents of micro-preemie babies throughout the United States and Canada.

 

Previously, Nick was President of the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs, one of the leading associations for hi-tech startups in Silicon Valley.  Nick was most recently a board member of the Silicon Valley chapter of the Association of Strategic Alliance Professonals.  He will also be attending the 2nd World Young Leaders Forum in Mumbai, presented by the BMW Stiftung Foundation. He has a BS in accounting from Indiana University.

 

The Real Deal

 

I was born in Toledo, Ohio in 1969 and grew up in Fremont, a small, blue-collar town, about thirty miles away.  Fremont is also the home of one of our more infamous US Presidents, Rutherford B. Hayes and probably better known as the exit off the toll-road if you're going to Cedar Point or Put-in-Bay.

 

My parents provided me and my two younger brothers with a life rich in experiences, that included the arts, travel, athletics and education.  My father is an estate planning attorney and appreciates the opportunity that he has to help others create their legacies.  My Mom helps high school students prepare for their college entrance exams.  I was the inspiration for her business by performing so poorly the first time I took my SAT exam.  The jury was still out on whether or not you could "prepare" and I did not.  I spent several hours that summer preparing with her for my second go-around and needless to say, my scores improved dramatically.  While we were growing up my Mom was a homemaker (and still an amazing cook) and when we were all in school, she returned to teaching Biology at my high school. 

 

I attended Fremont Ross High School where I graduated in 1988.  Fremont Ross is best known for its sports.  I focused primarily on my books and basketball.  After high school, I attended Indiana University, where I graduated in 1992.  My major was accounting, which was a challenging major, kept me in way too many nights, but it also promised job offers when I graduated. 

 

The major delivered as promised, a job at Price Waterhouse.  It didn't take long to realize my future as a bean counter would be limited, especially after being on a project where I had to drive around the Indiana countryside for miles and miles, pounding on silos to confirm that they were in fact, filled with beans. 

 

My soon-to-be fiancée landed a job after her college graduation with Playtex Products in Cincinnati, Ohio and that provided to incentive for me to find a new job opportunity.  I cold-called and put my resume in the mail to dozens of financial planning and money management companies in the area.  Can you believe, I actually remember looking up the company names and addresses in the phone book at the library?!?  Hard to believe that was only fifteen years ago!  My how times, and access to information, have changed.

 

I landed a job at Matson Financial.  It was part operations, part sales.  It was a nice opportunity for me to flex my entrepreneurial spirit and experience more of the business development side of the business world.  This was the late 90's and micro-brews were all the rage.  An acquaintance of mine asked if I would be interested taking a look at an investment they made in a hard cider company and make recommendations on what they should do next.  I made some recommendations, they liked them, and they offered me double what I was making plus restricted stock that would make me a paper millionaire.  Welcome to the dark side!  It took me about a year to realize that the investment bank backing this deal was a complete house of cards.  The company went public using a reverse merger with a public shell, a well-known pump and dump method for taking a company public. 

 

It was the early 1998 and the dot-com boom was just starting to take off when my wife got an offer to transfer to San Francisco.  I think we said yes, packed our bags and sold our house in three days…well maybe a little longer than that but not much! 

 

I started networking like crazy, not knowing a soul, and found the Bay area to be an incredibly open and welcoming environment and with the venture capital seemingly flowing in the streets (although I later discovered it was harder to find then the magazine articles would have you believe) it was an exciting and intoxicating time to be in "Silicon Valley".

 

Everyone in Hollywood has a script in their back pocket.  In Silicon Valley, everyone has a business plan, and I was no different.  My idea was to use the Internet to improve "business networking" (aka social networking).  My team and I pushed for nearly three years but at that time if you didn't have a seemingly billion dollar idea, you know, things like Boo.com, Webvan, Pets.com, etc…you couldn't get the time of day.  Looking back, my lesson learned was not finding a way to keep the idea alive because three years later with the Internet bust came the proliferation of social networking websites like Friendster, LinkedIn and Facebook.

 

I also had a wonderful experience as President of the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs.  Many of the programs that we created (during the "bust" days when sponsorship dollars weren't as plentiful) are still in existence today.  I also had about 5 minutes of fame after the bust with a website I created called Starupfailures.  The site was created to provide support and encouragement to entrepreneurs to help them bounce back quickly from failure.  In Silicon Valley, failure is a rite of passage but as I quickly learned, in other parts of the world, failure is something that can stick with you and make it difficult to try again.

 

I spent the next few years consulting with a handful of startups and launched a workshop series called Creating a Life You Love but I was growing tired of flying solo and was ready to find a new challenge. 

 

In 2005 I came across a unique opportunity at PricewaterhouseCoopers.  They were in the process of rebuilding their consulting practice after they sold much of it to IBM in 2002, and one of their channels for growth was through vendor alliances with software companies like SAP, Oracle, Computer Associates, Sun Microsystems, etc.  They were looking for a few entrepreneur-types who would take ownership for a geographic territory and figure out how to drive PwC services through those channels.  For me, it was a no-brainer.  A huge challenge that would benefit from my entrepreneurial experiences, the opportunity to work every day with talented people AND a budget!  Who could ask for anything more?

 

Four years later, and while the vendors I am responsible for and the territory has changed, the challenges and opportunities remain.  I know focus strictly on our security services for the US and am responsible for our vendor alliances with Computer Associates, Symantec, Aveksa and Sailpoint (plus any new ones that come on board).

 

Through all of my business ventures, the ups and the downs, I have learned an incredible number of lessons, about business and about myself, and most importantly I have a wonderful network of friends and peers.  That, after all, is what life is all about…