About me

For most of my career I’ve worked where the diamond trade meets new technology, which is a strange place to end up for someone who once called himself a non-techie. In 1983, a decade before most people had heard of the World Wide Web, I launched Polygon, the first business-to-business electronic trading network for diamonds. It started in New York as a joint venture with Xerox, moved with me to Dillon, Colorado, and eventually handled millions of dollars in diamond trades a day. In 1999 JCK named me one of the jewelry industry’s visionaries of the century, and in 2004 Mediagrif Interactive Technologies bought Polygon’s parent company. I eventually left to start something new.

In 2011 I co-founded VeriChannel, which built private trading platforms for the American Gem Society, the Independent Jewelers Organization and Forevermark, De Beers’s diamond brand. In 2015 I helped create the Museum of Named Diamonds (later renamed the Museum of Diamonds), a place to record the stories and meaning behind diamonds, whether famous (like the Koh-i-Noor) or personal (like my wife’s). The World Federation of Diamond Bourses later named it the official registry of named diamonds. In 2020 I launched Icecap, which turned investment-grade diamonds into tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. These days I run Icecap AI, and our Sherpa assistant made its debut at the World Diamond Congress in Singapore in 2026.

Business has taken me to jewelry shows and conferences on six continents, often as a speaker. If you’ve flown that far, you might as well look around, so I’ve added side trips wherever I could: 87 countries so far. Many of them became the travel stories on this site.

Before all that I built yachts, served as press secretary for a U.S. Senate campaign, flew as an executive pilot and taught skiing. It wasn’t exactly a career plan. I still hold a commercial pilot license with instrument and multi-engine ratings, and I sail, scuba dive, mountain bike and paddle white water whenever I get the chance.

I’m a world-class skeptic, which probably explains the commentary. I write it as a libertarian, mostly about energy, economics, health care and the environment. My first novel, Chrysalis, came out in 2020 and grew into the Chrysalis Trilogy, which wraps up with Lorendottir. I also wrote the Angel of Death Trilogy, about a ballet prodigy who becomes a legend in the African rainforest and then goes to work for MI6. Together the six books have sold more than 28,000 copies.

I’m married, with three children, and I live in Keystone, Colorado. Not a bad place to come home to.