About Me
A little about me..
At the time of writing I am 27 years old and live in the snow-covered Chicago neighborhood of River North. That uncalled-for weather jab may foreshadow my future living plans..
I grew up in a small town of New Jersey called Randolph. I am such a huge fan of the east coast — the personalities, the pace of life, and the prideful culture. You’ll never meet an east coaster that doesn’t think their part of the world is superior to all others. Love that.
A lot of my childhood revolved around sports and friends, and these came hand-in-hand. In High School, I played baseball, basketball, and golf and still try to play sports whenever I can. It’s my release.
My brother is a teaching golf professional and can officially beat me, which is tough for me admit. We’re not competitive at all..
After High School, I attended Indiana University at Bloomington. Although I grew up in the east coast, my parents and their families all have roots in the midwest, mainly in Indiana. For me there really was no other option for school than the Cream and Crimson.
I majored in Economics through the College of Arts and Sciences, with minors in both Marketing (Kelley School of Business) and Spanish. Was going for the diversified portfolio here I suppose.
After undergrad, I really didn’t know what I wanted to do so I decided to give the booming tech industry a go. I enrolled in the Indiana University Kelley School of Business Masters of Science in Information Systems (MSIS) graduate school program. Grad school was my catapult into both tech and a reliable work ethic. My professors taught us the basics about technology and it’s applicability to real-world companies/industries and us students pushed each other to produce the highest quality work as we were all competing for jobs.
After grad school, I worked for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Group (CME Group), the world’s largest Futures and Options exchange. My job title was IT Business Analyst and I was to determine, analyze, and communicate software requirements to engineers who supported an internal pricing app that calculated end-of-day settlement prices for most products listed on the exchange. CME Group was my catapult into software development. I learned through hands-on experience the techniques, skills, and processes necessary to complete software projects.
Eventually, I had the itch to join an early stage startup. I wanted to expand my skillset and I wanted the opportunity to affect the trajectory of a company. A new crypto exchange based in Chicago called Seed CX was looking for a Business Analyst, so I jumped at the opportunity. In addition to my core responsibility of clarifying software requirements to engineers, I perform operational tasks (ie, sending a wire payment to a customer to fulfill a withdrawal), lead product demos in hopes of landing a new client, create fancy dashboards that visualize company/product progress, lead our monthly billing process (figuring out how much to bill customers), and even manage a team of engineers. Seed CX (has since rebranded to Zero Hash), was my catapult into dealing with ambiguity. I’ve learned how to ‘figure it out’ despite a limited background on a topic.
Now, I spend most of my time trying to scale the business of Zero Hash. Our mission is to enable Fintech 2.0. We want to be the engine behind crypto trading and on-ramp platforms. It has been a blast scaling this business, especially over the last few months as the interest in crypto currencies has gone mainstream.
In my free time I like to play sports, hang and travel with friends, and read about and listen to smart people, mainly in the tech space.
There you have it, my whole life story. I plan on writing more blog posts on here, so just thought I’d give a reader a little more background on the writer if they so choose.
You can find me on other platforms as well:
- LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/maxhowenstine
- Twitter: @howenstine_max
- Instagram: @howenstine_max
Thanks for reading!
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