Thank you. Though, there is a profit motive. Happy employees do good work. Educated employees helped keep me in front of the competition that was coming online.

Thank you. Though, there is a profit motive. Happy employees do good work. Educated employees helped keep me in front of the competition that was coming online. We'd eventually expand to offering pedestrian traffic modeling. We'd sell appliances that enabled them to keep their data in-house, as well. Curiously enough, I'd expected to remain in academia. My dissertation (my Ph.D. is in Applied Mathematics) was based on traffic throughput, optimization and prediction, which led to a contract being offered. I was able to be in the right place, at the right time, and able to take advantage of it. The rest is, shall we say, history. I ended up in the field largely because the data was free and DEC was able to throw compute resources at me. It is largely luck, even though I put lots of work into it. Ah well... I don't have words of wisdom. It was largely due to just timing and being able to take the risks. Even selling was largely luck. The economy crashed and the government wanted to build/expand highways as 'shovel ready jobs.'