Ready Player One

April 2018, weekly Simmons Sharpe conference call:

Bill: I think it's time we got a Chief Technology Officer. It's time to incorporate regression and an AI-driven marketing optimization model into Prophetly. And clients are asking us for smart chatbots, augmented reality experiences, esports betting, blockchain applications...

Me (slightly miffed): But Bill, I can code.

Mitchell: Ummm............yeah, Heather.

I could hear Mitchell's eyes roll from 1,800 kilometers away. It was time to get a CTO.

And here's the thing about Bill Sharpe. If there are six degrees of separation between anyone and Kevin Bacon, there are 2 degrees of separation between anyone and Bill. He knows everyone.  "Heather, I think I know a guy..."

Andrew Opala, new CTO of Simmons Sharpe, looking scholarly.

Enter Andrew Opala, fresh off a successful exit at mobile data management platform Addictive Mobility (sold to Pelmorex in late 2017).  Andrew has a knack for being involved in interesting ideas and companies involved in big transitions.  Most recently he was part of Addictive Mobility's success at building a data science team dedicated to machine learning and artificial intelligence.  Previously, he constructed chatbots at Tenfour Labs, predictive NLP algorithms for sentence completion at Voxavox, and pioneered VR and AR streaming frameworks for the first real mobile phones at iseemedia.  Andrew holds several International mobile streaming patents in Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, certificates in ML, an MBA from Ivey, undergrad in Astronomy and Physics, and a hi-score in Galaga from 1984. 

Note that last one. Major esports street cred.

Welcome, Andrew! It's good to have a real engineer on the bridge.