about I was born in Winnetka, IL, just north of Chicago, on 9/9/66 (which, of course, makes me a horny devil;-). I was the youngest of three brothers and my mom, Barbara Kyle, said that I was always trying to keep up with them. She often remarked that I was the most competitive kid she had ever seen. Maybe that came from attempting to replicate everything my older brothers Peter and Kit were trying to do, or maybe it came from observing my dad, Bob Kyle, work day and night to build his business or prepare for a sailing competition. In either case, I spent my youth playing just about every sport possible including football, baseball, ice hockey, soccer, tennis, sailing, running, and myriad other activities. My main sport as a kid was hockey as this was very popular on the “North Shore”. I was fortunate that my parents emphasized education in addition to exposing us to athletics, so I spent very little time in front of a TV and a lot of time reading and doing homework (when I wasn’t engaged in some physical activity). I attended New Trier High School and played on the soccer and tennis teams before starting the school’s first ever sailing team. The year before, I had ‘retired’ from ice hockey in favor of focusing the majority of my athletic efforts on sailing. Having won most of the junior regattas I had entered, I thought I should get serious about the sport if I wanted to attain the goal I had set for myself at age 11, namely to win the world championships before my 20th birthday. Since I spent a fair amount of time on the water practicing, my grades were only so-so in high school. As a sophomore I knew I wanted to go to Tufts University since their sailing team was considered a dynasty and I thought the Boston area would be the ideal place for college. Oh, yah, Tufts had a pretty good International Relations department as well, so that was a nice bonus! Back to New Trier and the sailing team, we attended the interscholastic nationals at the Naval Academy (see photo of me competing at high school nationals ), the first team ever from the Midwest to do so. My senior year I became the national high school single handed sailing champion. That accomplishment, along with a lot of B’s and the occasional A, got me into Tufts and onto the sailing team. My years spent in Boston were as glorious as the Fall foliage along the Charles on a brisk late afternoon in October. I really thrived at university in all senses. My grades went from B’s in high school to virtually straight A’s. The Tufts sailing team turned out to be everything I had expected and more. We were the top team in the country my Freshman year. I took that intense collegiate sailing training and applied it to my solo sailing, winning the single handed world championships a year ahead of schedule, when I was 19. Despite my sailing successes (I won the North American championships that same year), I was becoming increasingly interested in my studies. After spending the Summer of 1986 studying business at Sophia University in Tokyo (remember, this was during the time when everyone thought Japan was going to take over the business world), I took my junior year abroad studying at the London School of Economics. While in London for the year, I sailed for the University of London sailing team – the “Great American Hope” as they called me. I also worked for the Financial Times, that funny looking salmon colored paper. I lived in a flat in the middle of Soho, shunning the student housing which was full of American kids replicating their U.S. based universities in Europe. I wanted an as indigenous experience as possible (to this day I get asked if I am from the UK about once a month, so something must have rubbed off on me there). It was during this time that I really gained a knowledge of and appreciation for world politics, macroeconomics and other forces that shape our society and world. The LSE has more countries represented than any other forum in the world save the United Nations and the Summer Olympics. So I really gained a tremendous exposure to global issues and numerous cultures while there. I also took advantage of the school’s two long breaks between tri-mesters to travel throughout Eastern Europe (it was still the Soviet Union at the time). Oh, the stories I could tell….(see photo of me drinking with Soviets). After graduating from Tufts, I headed down to NYC to work for JP Morgan Chase (Chemical Bank at the time) as a Financial Analyst. This was a typical two year pre-MBA work around the clock for minimum real wages type gig. Since my formal education was less technical than liberal arts focused, I thought a couple years on Wall Street would afford me solid practical financial skills. My first assignment was to analyze Drexel Burnham which went bankrupt about three weeks after I submitted my report. Thereafter I was known among the team of analysts as “Scott The Company Slayer.” While my fellow analysts typically put in ridiculous Wall Street hours to impress the bosses, I worked ‘half days’ (i.e. leaving by 7 p.m.) in favor of pursuing other interests including acting as President of the 2,000 member United States Sunfish Class Association. It was also during this time that I won my second world sailing championship. I would ‘sneak’ out of the office in the evening to get my training done to prepare for the competition, meeting my training partner Paul-Jon Patin on Long Island, sailing well past dark, taking the train back into the city and working on business school application essays until it was time to get in a few hours sleep and return to my life as a Wall Street analyst the next morning. After two years of life as an analyst, my prison term was up in NYC and it was time to head back to school. I applied to Harvard Business School and matriculated in the Fall of 1991. It was great to be back in Boston where I could run and bike along the Charles River. As with my time on Wall Street, I had other major undertakings going on in my life in addition to my main focus. In this case, I was helping my brother build a small computer company in Czechoslovakia (see photo of my brother and me with Czech partners in our Brno offices). We also held the license to the Soviet Union to build a Gold’s Gym (see photo of my brother at the Golds Gym site). So when I was not preparing for the next day’s case study, I was trying to figure out how to make money in the new wild west of Eastern Europe. Those activities, combined with a fair amount of biking and running around Boston (I saved my swimming for pools, knowing from years of sailing on the Charles that it is not a good body of water in which to immerse yourself), made my two years in Boston go by rather quickly to put it mildly. Upon graduation in 1993, I moved to Chicago where I spent the next 5 years as Director, International Division and Publisher, Trade Division of Dearborn Publishing Group, the largest publishing and training company in the world for the financial industries. The confluence of forces then emerging throughout the world could not have been any more fortuitous as it related to my work. Countries around the world were converting from socialism to capitalism at a rate unprecedented in history. Entirely new industries like real estate, insurance and securities were being developed in nations that either did not even exist a few years earlier (in the case of the former states of the Soviet Union) or had never possessed things like private property ownership or publicly traded companies. All of a sudden I found myself being summoned by the equivalent of the heads of the SEC of various countries around the world (see photo of me in China). Off I would go to meet with top diplomats and business people to help them shape entire industries that would affect millions of lives. Those were very challenging and exciting times to be in the financial industry publishing/training business. We got our books translated into dozens of languages including Chinese, Hungarian, Latvian, and languages I had never even heard of. I learned a tremendous amount during my five years at Dearborn. But the Pacific Ocean by way of La Jolla, CA, was calling my name like the sirens in the Odyssey. In 1997 I finally made the leap I knew I would one day make since the time I first saw the California coast back in my days as a competitive sailor. I just needed the right work situation, and due to the aligning of certain stars, that opportunity presented itself in early 1997. Triathlete Magazine was for sale and it seemed like the perfect opening to combine my skills and interests in publishing, finance and the sport of triathlon. So I made the entrepreneurial jump and purchased – via a private equity firm I co-founded - an interest in the magazine and became CEO/Publishing Director. It took a full year to turn the magazine around but by early 1998 the company was back on track. At that time we brought in John Duke to run the magazine so we could get back to being investors. John, who is still running the magazine today, is one of the best managers I have ever worked with. He is a dedicated, no-nonsense guy who is results focused. Over the subsequent years John created an industry powerhouse in Triathlete Magazine, a dominant position the business still enjoys to this day. By this point the Internet wave was beginning to form. No one ever could have predicted what a tsunami it would become, but we were ready for the ride of our lives. Not being one to sit idle for more than about 3 seconds, I and some others came up with the idea of moving registration for participatory events (marathons, triathlons, etc) from a tedious paper-based method to a convenient web-based process. Thus Active was born. We went through several name changes as we acquired and merged with companies along the way, but the concept always stayed the same: solve a problem that millions of customers face every year and create a business around that (in reality, the real value we were adding was to the event director rather than to the participant. The average event director had to open up thousands of pieces of mail, transcribe thousands of event forms into their home made databases, deposit checks, etc. With Active’s event director tools, they would wake up in the morning to find all the data already in the database and the money in their account. Talk about convenient!). Fast forward five years and Active today serves millions of people monthly who are looking for ways to enhance and enjoy health & fitness. I spent my four years at Active from inception in 1998 through the Spring of 2002 serving as CFO and Board member. During that time we raised in excess of $60 million and acquired 7 companies. We closed our first round of funding, $5M from Enterprise Partners the day after I returned from completing my first IronMan Triathlon in Australia. I spent the week before the race reading 50 page FAXes between training rides, runs and swims. While it truly was a wild ride on the financial markets roller coaster throughout the late 1990’s and early 00’s, all the while we were building a company that added value to our customers’ lives. To put it differently, the reason why Active was one of the few companies that actually survived the Internet crash was that from day one it was conceived of and built as a real company, not a get rich quick/ride the latest trend scheme (see dot come survivors article). I am confident that and proud of the fact that Active will invariably be around in one form or another for many years to come. Of course the very most important thing that came out of my four years at Active was meeting my soul mate, love of my life and future wife, Carlie Craig (now Carlie Kyle) in 1998. We quickly discovered that we were on the same wave and have been smiling and laughing together ever since (see photo of Carlie). We were married in September of 2003 along the beautiful shores of La Jolla, CA among friends and family. It was a wonderful day – the beginning of many more to come… After serving as CFO for Active for four years, I went back to being a full time investor, the original work goal I had when moving to California in 1997 but which had been sidetracked by two amazing experiences in being CEO of Triathlete Magazine and CFO of Active (where, for all intents and purposes, I spent much of my day doing the same thing pure investors do which is business analysis, due diligence and financial projections). In the Spring of 2002 I returned full time to my first business love which is professional money management.  Today I am the CEO and Chief Investment officer of Coastwise Capital Group, LLC which is a high end money management firm catering to high net worth individuals and institutions worldwide.  You can find more information at www.coastwisegroup.com. As my good friend Bob Dylan says, “today is the first day of the rest of your life.” Keep Jammin’! S

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