I was born in St. Louis, MO, into a late-blooming hippie commune. Although I am a Caucasian male, the name "Shanti" is usually given to female Indians (from India). The name is Hindi, or Sanskrit, for "peace".

Unfortunately for my hippie parents, I have now become a raging capitalist. However, after moving to California and pursuing the startup company dream of megariches with reckless abandon, I realized there were some things that are more important than money. Like people. I had neglected this basic fact for a while in pursuit of the Almighty dollar. Now I've gained some perspective and would like to start over again with a more balanced approach to life.

I believe in the benefits of what I see as three fundamental legs of Western Society: Democracy, Capitalism, and Science. These systems are not flawless, but they are in my opinion the "least worst" of all other possible systems, and thus I believe in them. I don't subscribe to dogmatic generalizations, so feel free to disagree with me ;)

My education was a very important priority for my parents from the beginning. My parents decided to live within the City limits (cheaper housing) and send me to private school, rather than moving out to the county and sending me to a better public county school. I was able to attend Washington University (in St. Louis) for free for three out of four years because one of my parents had worked there for 10+ years or so.

When I began WashU (as we affectionately refer to it), I initially wanted to become a lawyer. I had read one too many John Grisham novels and wanted to be just like Tom Cruise's character in The Firm (based on the book by J.G.). The plan would be to work 80 hours per week, make partner by 28, and retire by 35 (or something like that). But every lawyer that I spoke to told me that it wasn't really like that anymore, and that competition was stiff. Little did I realize at the time that they were just looking out for their own selfish interests. Now I always tell people, "Yea - the computer industry is too crowded. Better go into, uh, philosophy of trees."

What sealed the deal was my first computer-industry job (at the age of 18). I got paid $12 per hour to stare at a computer monitor with a map of the country filled with green dots (representing network connections); when one of the dots turned red, I called the company that ran the line (usually WorldCom), and complained that it was down. They usually already knew about it anyway, and I went back to doing my homework. No where else can you get paid $12 / hour to do your homework! So out went being a lawyer, and in came being a Computer Scientist / programmer.

I began teaching myself how to program in Java & Perl, and soon thereafter enrolled in my first CS course (CS101). I convinced the professor (Ron Cytron) to have a programming contest. Wouldn't you know it, I won for my multi-player networked version of Tetris (Deathmatch Tetris). You could play a friend in Tetris, and see his screen on your machine, over the web.

My next project evolved out of a personal website that I put up that was to mimic Slashdot.org. This was before blogging software was around, so I would make manual HTML updates to the site anytime I added a new story. That got old pretty quickly, so I realized that I needed something else (that was automated) to keep bringing people back to the site. I had just learned about Mp3s as a college freshman. They were all over the local network, but not everyone has the luxury of living in the dorms like that. So I figured I'd create an Mp3 search engine for the web. There were many Mp3 search engines that spidered FTP sites, but those were always really annoying. The downloads never worked, or the site always had a quota on it, or made you go click on banner ads. So I created one of the first Mp3 search engines for HTTP web sites (others included Audiofind.com and Mp3board.com).

Eventually I sold Mp3 Search Technologies and went to work for GlobalStreams.com. This was during the glory days of the Internet boom. We would have these long brainstorming sessions where no idea was too crazy to throw out. The company wasn't going in the mp3 direction (which was a good thing), but they used the site to get some traffic and exposure to their growing startup business.

This was all happening while I was still in college, and eventually I saw the writing on the wall when we were all asked to take pay cuts (in half). This was a very generous offer (since they could have just laid everyone off), but I decided to focus on my schoolwork instead of continuing to work there. It turns out they were bought / merged with another company, but kept the same name, and are still around today.

In April of my senior year, I was lucky enough to find a job in one of the worst tech economies ever. I worked for a year at SBC Communications in downtown St. Louis. They had a management training program called MATREX (I know, how cheesy), which stands for MAnagement TRansition EXchange. At SBC and seemingly every other large corporation, every little group or program has to have an acronym. If you don't have a catchy acronym, your little group/division is surely going nowhere, fast. They trained me up real good in Java, WebSphere, Teradata and Oracle. I was a Teradata/Oracle DBA for a while, as well as doing some web development work.

As a side hobby, while still working at good ol' Ma Bell, I created the website Popdex - the website popularity index. You can read more about Popdex on its About page.

Eventually a hot California chick lured me out west, along with dreams of warm sandy beaches and dot-com megariches. I ended up working in Los Angeles for a while with the startup company Traffic Logic. No, they don't make car traffic software. They are a hybrid SEO / search marketing company. Basically, if you want highly targeted keyword search traffic (similar to what you can purchase through Overture or Google AdWords), these guys are the ones to call. I built their sales proposal / payment system. Automating what formerly took sales reps 30 minutes, reducing the time necessary to just 5 minutes to send out sales proposals. I also built several directory and news portals for them using PHP, MySQL, Apache, and mod_rewrite.

I am currently developing several projects under the umbrella of Menlo Park 2.0. If you are interested in joining us in the creation of new entrepreneurial ventures, please see the menlo park 2.0 application page.

Languages that I can program in: Java, Perl, C/C++, ASP, PHP, etc.
Databases that I'm familiar with: MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server 2000, and Teradata

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