by Beverly Aarons
The first time Eben Pobee “saved” someone’s life with technology was when he created a simple pivot table to organize and summarize one million points of data. An immigrant from Ghana and a certified financial analyst, Pobee was a Microsoft Excel whiz with a good head for details and systems thinking. The project required him to wrangle a scrambled monstrosity of data governed by millions of rules. It was essentially a data nightmare. But it was the kind of nightmare that Pobee was more than eager to plunge into, and that much was obvious during our telephone interview.
“When I went in there, the project had been there for two years and nobody had tackled that because it needs a lot of thinking to do it,” Pobee said. There was a light playfulness to his voice as he shared the story of his first big job building systems. “Well, coincidentally and sadly, the manager who was tasked with that had 60 days to work on it or he was going to be fired.”
Continue reading From Excel Spreadsheet Whiz to Software Startup: A Conversation With Eben Pobee