As it will appear in the Spring 2009 issue of the Wharton Alumni Magazine.
I don’t know about you, but turning to the class of WG’92 is the first thing I look at in the Magazine. Cheers to Debbie Crouse. She’s been our cohort correspondent for three years and it’s a lot of work. Debbie, the mother of two and Group Manager at Intuit, needed a hand. I’ll help for a while. 🙂
I’ll start with a Joe Hage update. I live just outside Seattle. Beth and I celebrated 10 years of marriage this year, and we have two great boys: Zachary (6) and Lucas (4). Zach is a beautiful, quick, and sensitive little boy. Luke is my brother-in-law Gerry with a cheeky, get-in-trouble-but-too-cute-to-punish demeanor. I work as Director of Marketing Communications for Cardiac Science [Nasdaq: CSCX], makers of noninvasive cardiac equipment like ECG machines and defibrillators (AEDs). I love it. And I keep a blog at https://joehageonline.wpengine.com for fun.
T. Hardy Jackson lives in San Francisco and has “added value” as a consultant to Visa for years now. He’s become this real estate mogul on the side and his properties are in Seattle, so I get to see him every few months or so.
Dr. Ron Leopold visited a few months back. Almost lost to Zachary in checkers. He’s this published author and big muckety-muck at Met Life now. They pay him to entertain corporate prospects about the strategic significance of employee benefits. He lives in Atlanta with his wife Abbie, 13-year-old son Max, and two dogs, Speck and one who preferred to remain anonymous.
Rich Caligaris (an independent consultant), Dave Williams (at Google) and I invested in Kadoink, where fellow WG’92 Scott Cahill is co-founder and CEO. Kadoink is “a powerful mobile engagement platform that transforms the mobile phone into an interactive and revenue-producing communication channel.” After an early-2007 angel round, Kadoink closed a Series A with Sutter Hill Ventures and is gonna make us rich (fingers crossed).
Beth and I caught up with Matt Savage (a managing director at Rothschild) and his wife Beth in NYC and saw the Pulitzer Prize-winning play, August: Osage County. Definitely see the show if it comes to town: it’s one of the best I’ve ever seen. My Follies friend WG’93 David Richards is the general manager for the show and the upcoming national tour, so you’ll be helping a fellow Whartonite with your patronage.
Married more than 20 years now, Yuichi Hiromoto has a 15-year-old tennis-loving son and an 11-year-old cartoon-loving daughter. O-Hiromoto-san is the president and CEO of Mitsubishi Corp – UBS Realty Inc., a joint venture that manages the Japan Retail Fund (Ticker: 8953) and the Industrial and Infrastructure Fund (Ticker: 3249). You can enjoy a Bloomberg interview of Yuichi here. If you poke around the Web, you can also find a pictures of him (hair graying executively) surrounded by characters my computer doesn’t understand.
White Mountains [NYSE: WTM], which owns Esurance, acquired Rob Slingerland‘s Answer Financial Network. He’s happy about the acquisition and says things are going well under new management.
By the time this goes to press, Peter Smith should be a new dad! He got married two years ago, started a new job (I didn’t catch where), and is buying a new home. Good friend and fellow cohorter Paul Kirincich left Netflix this summer after six years with the company. He’s now the CFO of a Burlingame, CA retiree health insurance company. He’s got 11 happily married years, two sons (ages 5 and 2), and a beautiful home in Menlo Park, CA.
Good to catch up. Drop me a line at joe@joehageonline.wpengine.com to be included in the next update!
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