From the Archive
Some threads reveal themselves only in retrospect.
In April 1984, the Deseret News profiled me as president of Richards-Woodbury Mortgage Corporation. At the time, I was immersed in real estate finance, institutional capital, development and a financial-services industry undergoing significant change.
Reading the article more than four decades later, what interests me most is not the position I held or the transactions described. It is the pattern already beginning to emerge.
I was looking for unmet needs. Asking how capital could be connected with opportunity. Thinking about credibility, institutional structure and risk. Watching technology change what was possible. And recognizing that ultimately, people, relationships and standards determine whether an institution can endure.
The language has changed over the years. The underlying questions have not.
Looking Back — and Forward
What role do we fill when the world around us is changing?
What strikes me today is that this was already one of the questions I was asking in 1984.
Then, the forces were deregulation, consolidation, national capital markets, computers and rapidly improving communications.
Today, the forces are different—AI, distributed information, new forms of capital, changing institutions and an accelerating redefinition of how people and organizations establish trust.
See what is changing.
See what is becoming possible.
Understand what must be true for it to work.
Then help create the structure capable of carrying it forward.
That thread has followed me through real estate, finance, technology, entrepreneurship, philanthropy and institutional work.
Perhaps it is less a career path than a way of seeing.
And more than forty years later, I find myself returning to essentially the same question:
What is trying to become possible now?