After graduating from California State University, Northridge with a double major in finance and real estate I went to work for a real estate development company that built about 300 apartment units per year. I then sold commercial real estate before entering the mortgage lending business, working for two mortgage brokerage companies before starting my own. After founding, operating and selling my own mortgage brokerage company I changed course and joined an early stage Internet company as the fifth employee back in 1995. This company, Quote.com, was the first company to provide stock quotes on the Internet. We were funded by legendary venture capitalist, Mike Moritz of Sequoia Capital. Mike and Sequoia invested in Yahoo! a few months earlier and Mike brokered a meeting I was at between Quote.com and Yahoo!, who at the time had only 15 employees.

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In 1996 I joined the two co-founders of XOOM.com as their first employee. At XOOM.com we built a community website in the same pier group as GeoCities, The Globe, Tripod, Angelfire, etc. These were the first iterations of social media which would eventually produce companies like MySpace and Facebook. We used our community website to direct market products to our member base and also sold advertising on our high traffic website. We were able to take the company public in December of 1998 and then do a merger which combined XOOM.com, Snap!, NBC.com and other web properties to create NBCi.

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After XOOM.com/NBCi I started investing in apartment buildings with colleagues from the first real estate company I worked for after college. I also invested in a several Internet startups, joined some of the boards of directors of these companies and even took an operating role at one of them. After we sold the company at which I was on the board and also had an operating role, I focused on my real estate investing in apartment buildings and started to invest in private money loans.