>> When I graduated from Rollins, both my wife and I knew that we wanted to go off
to grad school, but we didn't quite know what it was.
I thought at the time that I wanted to go to get my MBA and all of the MBA programs
that I was looking at that had, you know, entertainment
or a very international [inaudible] required 5 years of work experience.
So we -- my wife and I kind of talked, and you know, as a [inaudible] go for the standard,
you know, try to get a job in consultant -- consulting or banking or something like that?
Or do you -- do we try to kind of make a unique statement.
So my wife and I both decided that joining the Peace Corp was a,
you know, kind of fit into our paradigm.
It's a project that you -- it's your own work that makes your experience.
You know, you're kind of dropped off in a village and you have to go out and meet people
and learn the language, and figure out what skills you have innately yourself
that you can help improve the community with.
I had a variety of careers -- or I wouldn't say careers -- but a variety of jobs.
Especially while I was at Rollins.
And then after Rollins.
And then while I was at grad school, and after grad school.
And I tried to look for what thread, among all those jobs,
all the things that -- what did I really like to do?
And we realized that it was in story telling.
So I tried to chase what my spark was, and kind of stumbled into the work that I'm doing now.
I ended up falling into the entertainment industry by working on a project
that was -- I was hired to do by Sony.
It was part of my graduate degree, and it was specifically to help them start
up their Arabia offices in the Middle East.
So it was based out of Dubai with offices in Cairo and Beirut.
When I actually showed up to start implementing it, you know,
it ended up moving a lot slower than anybody anticipated.
There are 3 different cultures.
3 different legal systems; approvals
where culturally they aren't as efficient as the US works.
So as kind of that downtime happened, you know, I started volunteering for different areas
and it ended up being that I was sitting in the development area.
So I started working with the light entertainment group
to actually start pitching some shows.
And those were picked up, so we started pitching some more.
And just kind of fell into the development side, along with production --
which production is much more business oriented.
But it was low-level, project-based work right off the bat.
And then when Brada actually opened up, I saw on the last day of my project,
I saw that in "Variety" that they put out a press release for it.
Went around to all -- you know, what you're supposed to do --
went around to all your friends; all your connections saying,
hey does anybody know Galmar D'Otoro [phonetic] Garamond Navarro [phonetic] or Matt [Inaudible],
you know how do we -- how can I make a connection to them?
Strangely enough, nobody from Sony knew them at all.
So I ended up doing what you're -- they tell you not to do,
which is submit a resume to a blank website.
And the Director of HR, you know, by chance was -- read every single resume that came in
and I -- I made a statement with her, and it was enough to get me
in for an interview and we went from there.
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