Email addr removed
rick @ {domain name}

1989 - 1996

Reality Online's was a pioneer providing financial planning tools and services for the home investor.  In the beginning, Reality was alone this offering.  Today the market is huge.

Richard joined Reality to run a technical team dedicated to building custom software for the Prodigy service.  In 1990, there were just a handful of online services and Prodigy was the only one that offered a truly graphical interface.  That is what originally attracted Reality to want to build financial planning tools and educational game to the service.

The prodigy relationship grew to the point that Reality team built the most complex application ever brought to the Prodigy service.  A game called Baseball Manager.  Baseball Manager consisted of over 200 screens and had a transaction processing back-end system that processed stats from real major league baseball players into the fantasy holdings of the gamers.  Baseball Manager is stilled played today but I am sure it had been re-architected.

While managing the Prodigy efforts, Richard became involved in an increasing number of other custom software projects at the company.  These applications included financial planning, portfolio management and sales automation.  Richard was promoted to Vice President during this time.

At the same time, Reality was considering a huge transformation of its offering.  For the past many years, Reality was offering historical stock and mutual fund information on a quarterly basis, delivered via floppy disk.  Reality realized that this was a great business that could be made even better if we delivered this data via modem to a central computer system at Reality's headquarters.

In 1992-3, Richard -- along with others at Reality -- designed and built a transaction processing system that would service the demand for current and historical financial data.  At the completion of this, Reality Technologies transformed itself into Reality Online -- becoming the first company to deliver financial data in this way.

From there, Richard was promoted to VP of Development and ran a department of about 40 engineers.  Projects included capacity buildouts, portfolio management, financial planning and online brokerage applications.  At various times, Richard was also managing other non-technical departments.  This included documentation, QA and product management.