[Images above: India 2011, Dubai 2012, China 2014, Kyrgyzstan 2014, Burma 2015, Spain 2015, France 2012.]

I am writing this blog for high school and college students (but all readers are welcome).

Why me?

• Young people regularly ask me for advice on how to prepare for their future (I assume due to my career success and my experience with higher education).
• I predicted the rise of the Internet and the decline of Windows in my May, 1995, memo The Web is the Next Platform.
• In my March, 2003, memo Connecting Students to Northwestern Forever, I described a college social networking site 10 months before Mark Zuckerberg started www.thefacebook.com in January, 2004.
• I started and led the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft Corporation through the release of IE 3.0 (1994-1996).  [I joined ~800-person Microsoft in 6/1985, and it grew to +30K people by the time I left in 8/1999.]
  (Listen to this 11/2014 Internet History Podcast, to hear me discuss my experiences developing Internet Explorer.)
• I started the online educational software company DreamBox Learning in 2006 and sold it in 2010 (to Netflix CEO Reed Hastings), retaining a small economic interest. The Rise Fund (under the TPG umbrella) purchased a controlling interest in DreamBox Learning in 2018. At that time, DreamBox was used by nearly 3M students and 120K teachers in North America.
• I am an active technology “angel” investor and advisor.  My current investment portfolio includes AppSheet, Azuqua, Blaze Bioscience, Cyrus Biotechnology, dCentralized, DreamBox, and GlowForge, and I am advising Albert.io.
• In the past, I was an Investor in and Director of both TeachFirst (acquired by Editure) and Vizrea (acquired by Microsoft). I was also a Director of non-profit GroundSpring.org (acquired by Network for Good) and an Adviser to SignalSense (acquired by Splunk) and UIEvolution (acquired by Square Enix).
• I served 20 yeas on the Northwestern University board of trustees (1998-2018). During that span, I spent 4-5 weeks a year in Evanston and Chicago, meeting with students, faculty, staff and alumni in addition to my board duties. I served on these board committees: Northwestern Medicine (overseeing our Feinberg School of Medicine and our relationship with Northwestern Memorial Healthcare), Educational Properties (buildings and grounds), Budget/Finance, Information Technology, and Alumni Relations and Development. I also served on the EECS Department advisory board (on and off  between 1989-2018) and the NUvention Web+Media (entrepreneurship course) advisory board (2010-2018).
• I earned BS degrees in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics in 1982, and an MS degree in Computer Science in 1985, all from Northwestern University.
• My wife Lisa and I became philanthropists in early 1998 (see Wissner-Slivka Foundation) and some of our more recent grants have been focused on the life sciences, including Project Violet at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the Institute for Protein Design (IPD) at the University of Washington.  I’m currently chairing the IPD Campaign Council.
• See my LinkedIn profile for more details.

You can watch my May 2014 commencement address in Kyrgyzstan to learn about the first 25 years of my life (knitting, sewing, cooking, wood shop, metal shop, typing, drafting, offset press printing, journalism, constitutional law, computer programming, model rockets, various flunky jobs, etc.)

And here is a short video interview with me from 2012 (my 30th college reunion) about some of my experiences at Northwestern University.

A few of my road race times are here (I most enjoyed the 2010 New York Marathon).

I have visited 50 countries (42 since 2014) outside of the USA: Argentina (2018), Austria (2018), Barbados (2016), Belgium (2017), Bhutan (2015), Botswana (2015), Brazil (2018) [1], Burma (2015), Cambodia (2015), Canada (2017), Chile (2018), China (2017), Costa Rica (2017), Czechia (2017), Denmark (2008), Ecuador (2016), France (2018), Germany (2018), Guatemala (2018), Hong Kong (2014), Iceland (2014), India (2016), Ireland (2009), Israel (2014), Italy (2017), Japan (2014), Kazakhstan (2014), South Korea (2015), Kenya (2017), Kyrgyzstan (2014), Laos (2015), México (2017), Netherlands (2017), New Zealand (2003), Panama (2017), Peru (2018), Portugal (2003), Qatar (2017), Romania (2018), Saint Lucia (2016), South Africa (2015), Spain (2016), Switzerland (2013), Tanzania (2017), Thailand (2015), United Arab Emirates (2012), United Kingdom (2018), Vietnam (2015), Zambia (2015), and Zimbabwe (2015) [2].

[Links above are either to my videos on YouTube or my travelogs on slivka.com.]

[1] I spent only a few hours in Brazil, visiting Iguazú Falls.
[2] I spent only a few hours in Zimbabwe, visiting Victoria Falls.