MBC REI, LLC

MBC Real Estate Investing (REI) was established to share the knowledge that I have gained over 30+ years of real estate investing with people who are fully invested in their careers but interested in building a stable foundation for their finances over the long term. 

There will also be opportunities to co-invest with me on certain deals, assuming our investment philosophies align. My approach isn't for people who want to be actively involved in their real estate investments, or for people looking to make a quick buck and move on. This is for people who want to establish multiple streams of passive income while continuing to develop their career, interests, and life outside of REI.

Despite the common hype, there are ways to do that and I can show you how - and why I have chosen this path.  My blog posts share the reasons I believe this is an amazing, and highly under-appreciated, opportunity and the lessons I have learnt throughout my investing career. 

If you are interested in finding out more about what I have done, my philosophy, and what is coming next, lets talk: https://calendly.com/mbc-rei/short-call-about-rei

Chief Real Estate Investor

Amazon

I am currently on the Reconciliation team within Amazon. This team takes the product descriptions provided by sellers and combines them to create a single representative product description, which is then shown to Amazon customers. 

A couple of the programs I am involved with: 

I am simplifying the selling partner experience so that our internal (those selling to Amazon) and external  (those selling directly to customers) selling partners have the same privileges. This required obtaining alignment across multiple teams (4 director level organizations with many other interested parties). I performed a detailed data analysis across the Amazon catalog, using spark to segment the data into different risk groups, proposed risk mitigation alternatives based on the different groups, worked the the VPs representing the primary stakeholders, and generated metrics to measure progress and impact of the changes. The initial phase of this program, launched in 2021, has been applied to 94% of our brands. The remaining brands have exceptions which we are working through. Not only has this improved the seller experience, giving brand owners more control over their brand on the website, it has eliminated hundreds of seller contacts per week.

I am actively running a program focused on improving developer velocity by identifying and addressing key pain points in our team's development process. The first year of this program (2022) is picking some low hanging fruit by addressing glaring deficiencies in our deployment pipeline by incorporating best practices. This has reduced out P50 deployment times by a factor of 14, with a corresponding increase in deployments. In 2023, we are looking to tackle some of the tech debt that has prevented us from fully separating into 2 pizza teams and having independent development cycles.

Principal Technical Program Manager (TPM) - Defining the Amazon Catalog 

4/19 - present, Principal Technical Program Manager
4/16 - 3/19, Senior Technical Program Manager 

The offer services team owns 2 teir-1 services that provide offer and product data to all amazon marketplaces worldwide. My role is focused on delivering new foundational features that will enable new business opportunities to launch quickly, while maintaining the scalability and latency of the platform as it serves billions of requests per day.  

I coordinate the interactions between my technical teams, other development teams, and our customers. To prioritize the customer requests to ensure the team can remain focused on the most impactful work, I use key business metrics to rank the projects and identify those that both my team can uniquely address and which have the most significant impact to the company. For those that have a high impact, I take a strategic view to develop requirements and work with the team to translate that vision into a plan, set schedules, and deliver. I significantly influence the specific technical direction taken, pushing the team to consider alternatives and simplify our architecture - improving both scalablity and maintainability.  To support decisions, I dive deep into the data to ask questions and understand the impact of a change on our team and our customers. 

Example team projects:  
- Managed the re-writing of the offer buyability platform to support new features while maintaining the current scale and performance characteristics. In addition to improving the platform, the new features enable multiple $1B business initiatives within the company and are projected to save over $100MM in the first year. 
- Deprecated an old version of our service, moving customers to a newer, more functional version of the service while reducing operational load on the team

Principal Technical Program Manager (TPM)- Managing Scalable, Complex, Business Critical Platforms

10/15 - 3/16  Senior Technical Program Manager 
11/13 - 9/15  Technical Program Manager

During my first 2.25 years at Amazon. I was the TPM for the Normalization team. This team is responsible for taking the seller submitted product data and transforming it to a standard representation. This allowed the information to be matched to already existing products within the Amazon catalog, enabling multiple sellers to sell the same item. 

One of our major projects was to develop a new categorization infrastructure to allow teams to define rules for data transformation on. The original platform was a strict hierarchy, which made rule definition unnecessarily complicated. For example, you could either define rules for all Nike shoes or all Men's shoes, depending on which was higher in the hierarchy. But defining a rule on the lower category required duplicating the rules at the lower level (eg men's Nikes, women's Nikes, kids Nikes, etc). Instead, we used semantic graph technology to allow rules to be defined on an ontology. This simplified rule creation, decreased the number of rules required, and reduce the operational load required to ensure rule consistency. 

I was promoted to Senior TPM 6 months before transitioning to the Offer Service team.  I switched teams to increase the scope of my work, learn about a new part of the organization, and challenge myself by moving onto a team that owns "tier-1" (ie website critical) services. 

Other example team projects:  
- Deprecated a tool that was widely used (abused) across the company after ensuring appropriate alternatives were in place and customers had time to make the transition. 
- Improved customer and seller experiences by restricting abuse of variations by malicious sellers

Senior Technical Program Manager (TPM) - Focused on Data Standardization

CG Real Estate Investing, LLC

I have been investing in real estate for over 30 years now and have done a wide variety of things - some of which I have enjoyed and continue to pursue (I still have a couple of single family rentals), others (like short term rentals) I haven't had as much success with. That is one of the great things about REI - there are plenty of opportunities to find what works best for you. 
Currently, I am most interested in syndications. I have invested in several over the past 5 years - ranging from storage units and mobile home parks to notes to an orange orchard in Paraguay. While the investments are diverse, the focus has been on regular cash flow, with appreciation being a bonus not the main benefit. 
GC Real Estate is the private umbrella that represents my personal investments. I have created MBC REI as an opportunity for us to join forces and co-invest. Follow my blog there for more information about syndications and future opportunities
Please don't reach out to sell me your services. I will block anyone who tries to sell me something unsolicited.

Real Estate Investor 

City Escapes Nature Photography

I support our small nature photography company on a part-time basis (usually only a few hours per month). 

I am responsible for the development and deployment all of the technology components . Most obviously this includes the company web page and the on-line sales capability. I have developed a back-end infrastructure - including a SQLServer database to record all of the picture information, python scripts to automatically generate the web pages, SQL queries to generate reports on sales, and spreadsheets to track expenses - to make this process as efficient as possible. I also distribute our monthly newsletter and maintain our social media presence. 

In addition to allowing me to do some, minor, programming, this position has given me exposure to technology that I would not normally use in my other position: RSS feeds, checkout processing . credit card sales solutions (e.g. Google checkout and Square), blogger, flickr, SEO, and web analytics.

Chief Technology Officer

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL)

At PNNL, I continued to build my data management, analysis, and dissemination expertise. 

The projects I worked on varied over time - the major ones are described below. I work with a wide variety of stakeholders and am proud of consistently delivering exceptional results. I also had a line management position at PNNL, held in conjunction with this one, described in more detail below. 

While I think of myself as a "data" person, my role has been one of technical leadership (project / program management) - combining both administrative and technical responsibilities. My responsibilities were broad, and this gave me the opportunity to build transferable skills while allowing me to become familiar with new technologies. 

I work with stakeholders to understand their data management and analysis problems and then work with my team to solve them. This includes putting together the team (usually 3-30 people), setting the schedule and milestones, managing the budget, and delivering the solution. I work closely with my team, typically using an agile-like approach, to design and develop appropriate solutions to our problems. This includes ensuring that the solutions are both general enough and scalable enough to meet the requirements. 

I find mentoring my team to be an extremely important and rewarding part of my job. I enjoy helping people find their niche in the project and the organization. 

Representative accomplishments: 
-  Provided DHS agents actionable information used to open new criminal cases
-  Reduced time required for local crime analysts to obtain actionable information by 10x
-  Improved PMU data quality by removing erroneous records and reduced false positives by 100x
-  Published book on Data Intensive Science

Chief Scientist, Scientific Data Management Group-Specializing in Managing Data Intensive Research

Within PNNL, group leaders are the front line managers responsible for career development, mentoring, salary management, performance appraisals, and working with senior managers and HR to address performance problems and hiring requirements. This role is part-time with no technical responsibilities and is typically performed concurrently with a separate technical role. As line manager for a group of approximately 25 people for 2 years, I fully participated in the breadth of these activities. 

I am particularly pleased with how I helped my group adjust to a reorganization that moved our division into a research organization from an organization that was more operationally oriented. This transition significantly changed the performance expectations for all staff by providing increased focus on research and publications. For obvious reasons, this caused great concern among our developers about how their work would be valued and whether or not they would be able to meet these new requirements. I worked with each staff member to set clear goals relevant to our new organization, and helped them understand how their work contributed to the division's new mission. I also identified opportunities for publishing their work, helped identify research topics within the scope of the projects they worked on, and defended their contributions to upper management. 

I also spent time mentoring both our junior staff members and our senior staff with the dual goal of increasing communication across the group and helping them find their best career path within the organization. One of the benefits of the national lab system is the ability to guide your career in different directions, and I felt it was important for my entire group to take an active role in deciding where they wanted to go.

Scientific Data Management Group Lead

Lawrence Livernore National Laboratory (LLNL)

At LLNL, I managed a significant research and development program focused on addressing data management and analysis problems within DOE, DHS, and the broader scientific and national security communities. In particular, I was responsible for defining the problem, obtaining funding, setting the technical direction of the project and interacting with stakeholders. I used both agile and waterfall SDLC approaches, depending on the project.  My projects had three distinct thrust areas:  large-scale data management and analysis, text analysis, and workflows. 

On the data management and analysis side I led: the Ad Hoc Query project, which used approximation algorithms and hierarchical data structures to enable best-result searching over large-scale, scientific (mesh) data; and the GDDAI project, where we deployed OLAP, geospatial analysis, link analysis and statistical analysis to help ICE identify criminal activity. 

On the text analysis side, I led: the Biodefense Knowledge Center development team, where we used semantic graphs to represent moderate-sized text and relational knowledge bases and supported complex queries through canned queries; a project focused on using semantics, in particular domain-specific information, to improve information retrieval from text; and a project focused on developing a novel co-reference resolution capability that would provide improved results by using a domain-specific knowledge base to help resolve ambiguous references in text.   

On the workflow side, I led the multi-organizational Scientific Process Automation task within the SciDAC Scientific Data Management (SDM) Center. This task is focused on developing and deploying the Kepler infrastructure for scientific workflows.  

As a result of these activities I published over 40 peer reviewed papers, gave dozens of presentations to sponsors and other researchers, collaborated extensively with external researchers, and mentored several students and junior staff members

PI / computer scientist - Cutting Edge Data Science, Bioinformatics, and National Security Research

I worked as part of a team building a genomics data warehouse. My specific responsiblity was to develop a semi-automatic approach to performing the data transformations required to move information from the data source to the warehouse. This position built on the bioinformatics expertise I gained while a graduate student at Utah.

Post-doc

I am here to help you break your dependence on your paycheck! 

You may love your job. Or you may hate it. It doesn't matter. 

If something goes wrong - a layoff, an emergency, an illness - and you lose that paycheck, you need a way to cover your expenses. Your retirement account won't cut it. You need regular, ongoing, cash flow coming in to keep the bills paid and your family secure.  

Not having that is a source of stress - especially when companies keep announcing massive layoffs. 

It's enough to give you nightmares and keep you up at night. 

I have been there. But now I sleep better at night knowing that even if I lose my day job, I have enough passive income coming in to cover my bills. 

Yes, I still have a job - because I like what I do and am still building income streams to fund my ideal lifestyle. I am not ready to step away yet, but can see the point where I will no longer be trading my time for money - I will be doing exactly what I want to do. 

What would you do if you didn't need to trade your time for money? 

Let me show you how to reduce, and eventually eliminate, your dependency on your paycheck. It doesn't happen overnight, but over time you will be able to cover your expenses, then your entire lifestyle.

Connect with me here on LI (where I post all of my content), take a look at my blog (https://mbc-rei.com/blog), and if you want to talk, schedule a call with me (https://calendly.com/mbc-rei/short-call-about-rei). 

Let me help you get out of the rat race and start living your ideal life!

Taplio

Terence Critchlow's Linkedin Analytics

Terence Critchlow

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