It went live in October 2005 and I hope it has been a useful tool for parents like me and my husband, who are moving to the area. It was a dry run for Woland Technology, and looking back I’m pretty
What is your background-what were you doing before this business?
I have a Masters degree in Computer Science from the University of Michigan, but I didn’t start out creating websites. Most of the programming I’ve done before Woland – working at large financial institutions like Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and Merrill Lynch – involved designing customized software systems for their sales, trading and back-office operations: complex database-driven applications written over many months by teams of programmers around the world. It was everything you might expect from working on Wall Street during the tail end of the Dot-Com era: long hours, lots of pressure, and no end of colorful personalities and general craziness. Despite the stress, it was a great experience that taught me a great deal about how to manage projects, motivate my employees, and deliver a product my clients appreciated. Incidentally, when your clients have included Wall Street securities traders, there’s not much any other client can do to shock or upset you. It’s a very high bar.
The fork in my road came with the birth of our first daughter, Rebecca, right around the collapse of the Dot-Com bubble on Wall Street, and two months to the day before
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happy with the way it turned out.
Currently, KidsInCharlotte gets 25,000 visitors a month, on average.
9/11. It seemed like a good opportunity to become a full-time mom, and I took it. A year later, we moved to London, where our second daughter, Polly, was born. A few years after that, we moved back to the U.S., where our third daughter, Mia, was born, and I began to write KidsInCharlotte on a whim. Once that project was done, and I realized I could do it flexibly enough to accommodate my children’s schedules, I formed Woland Technology and hung out my shingle (or meta-shingle if we’re talking about Google). The technical side wasn’t very hard after my experience at the New York investment banks. Plus, I quickly realized how much I love working with different kinds of businesses, meeting new people, entrepreneurs from every background, who have so much enthusiasm and such amazing ideas. It’s a lot of fun and very gratifying to know, and to be told, you’ve done a great job.
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