About Me
Posted Sunday January 15, 2006
Short Version:
Born in Baltimore. Grew up in the big city. Came out West to college at Pomona. Web since 1995; writer since even earlier. Strategic communications consultant, dot-com software project manager, entrepreneur and Web designer. MBA from USC Marshall School of Business. Love cooking, photography, organization, the Web. Overall sunny outlook, matching sunny location in Los Angeles. Currently President and Founder of Dine to Thrive
Medium Version:
See the Resumé.
Long Version:
My name is Wade Armstrong - thus the URL for this site - and I’m currently an entrepreneur with a health/food business called Dine to Thrive and MBA grad from the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business. In past lives, I’ve been a strategic communications consultant for non-profits, a project manager for a dot-com, an entrepreneur and Web designer, and a Real Estate marketer.
All of that qualifies as a couple of trips around the block, pretty good for a kid who grew up in Baltimore (a vastly underrated city) and then graduated from Pomona College, a small liberal arts school near Los Angeles. At Pomona, I double-majored in Political Science and Psychology - fascinating subjects that made me learn to think well - but I probably learned the most from editing the student-run newspaper and from designing Web sites, a technology I’ve worked with since 1995. In fact, I was fascinated with the communicative power of the Internet even before the Web came along; I tried to get the newspaper hosted on Pomona’s Gopher server, so that alumni could read the articles and grow closer to their alma mater (how little I knew then about what alums wanted!).
In an effort to get an internship in the summer of 1995, I learned HTML and designed my first Web page. While, today, books are written about the HTML language and supporting technologies like javascript, PHP, and ASP.NET, 1995 was early in the Web’s growth and I learned all of HTML just by reading the official language specification. Like everyone else, I went through my gaudy background phase, used animated GIFs everywhere, experimented with the <MARQUEE> tag, created complex, nested tables (actually, one of my specialties for a while was figuring out the most elegant possible table that could be used to lay out a site) and, worst of all, created static sites that sat there for months without being updated.
When I graduated, I realized that my love of writing and my love of the Web could be merged into a career helping people communicate - and so I ended up doing strategic communications consulting at Pacific Visions Communications (now Marmillion + Company). While there, I had the opportunity to work with a variety of fascinating education- and arts-related nonprofits, as well as a few governmental entities. Then, being as we were in the late ’90s, I made a stop at a dot-com, doing software product management and customization for a company with a clever idea. After a bit, I jumped ship to start a Web and print design company with a college friend and his brother, an experience that taught me a lot about client management, technology (I became fluent in ASP and quite comfortable with SQL Server, in order to make dynamic pages), and entrepreneurship. When that ended (badly, unfortunately, as do many businesses started with friends), I did a quick stint at a residential real estate developer, learning a lot about media buying and putting to good use what I’d already learned about communications, marketing, and design.
With all of these travels, I never took away was a set of systematic tools to help get my mind started, keep my thoughts organized, and drive my approach to problems - or an understanding of how to manage, model, and visualize financial considerations. My MBA provided me with those, and getting it was an amazingly exciting journey that I was fortunate to share with some of the smartest people I’ve ever met.
These days, I fill the time not taken up by starting a business with cooking - I love trying new gourmet treats and improving my skills; photography, to which I’m returning with gusto after a nearly 10-year absence; fooling around with Web technologies; and an obsession with better-optimizing my personal organization and my approach to work. Every day is a chance to build and to be a better me.
Obligatory Photo
