Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. A couple of hundred have contributed since 2009 on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.
This time it is Marne Martin, President for Service Management, EAM & Global Industries at IFS, a leading global software company. She was recently named as one of the top 50 women leaders in SaaS world. The more I hear about her career, her travels, her sports, the more it strikes me that he is modern-day Renaissance Woman. She attributes her success to being versatile and coachable. She has a combination of verbal and math skills, is fairly ambidextrous, is a natural at learning and has a lot of resilience. And to top it off she has a great work ethic. Here she writes about her enduring connection with horses that started as a child growing up on ranches.
“Horses and STEM disciplines have been tightly connected all through my life, both in school years and an adult as I developed my technology career.
I was born on a ranch with horses and cattle. Going back centuries, my family on both sides have been in agriculture and when they moved to the Western United States and settled in what become the states of Montana and Wyoming. Education wise, I primarily focused on STEM classes in high school and then went on to major in international finance and economics.
Developing horses is similar to developing a technology business: it is a game of math, probabilities and instrumented results. You have likely heard about the “rule of 40” in software. Here is a site which focuses on the math associated with horseback riding. As I will discuss later, the scoring of dressage is similarly complex. Likewise, the genetics of breeding have plenty of biology and botany.
Similarly, cattle drives are a bit like technology sales cycles. You have varied decision makers within a complex set of stakeholders. Cattle herds have a mix of experienced/older cows that know pastures and their state in each season. They are like digital transformation veterans who know the way and the steps to organize themselves. The younger, less experienced calves, sometimes follow the group, but can wander off at other times. That’s similar to project team members who are risk takers. Finally, you have the bulls that lead their own path and often get into fights. You have multiple riders in concert driving the herd. if you have ever ridden a cutting or roping horse, you know it is an essential and well-trained team member.
Whether in business, academic studies or horses, I have always been motivated to learn new things and push boundaries to accomplish difficult objectives. On social media in particular, it is suggested that success comes easily. But it never does - there are often twists and turns with many seen and unseen complications.
Let’s start at the very beginning.
My family moved after the Civil War and settled in the West of the US, in what became the states of Montana and Wyoming. They were fairly well-known in ranching circles and show up in various halls of fame.
I was born in Oregon and we moved to our Montana ranch when I was four around the time when I started kindergarten. I spent most summers on my grandfather's ranch in Wyoming and then we moved there when I was eleven.
Both my parents rode and as is common with ranch families, they had photos taken with the baby sitting on a horse. We also had annual cattle sales and people flew in from all over the place. Stick the cute toddler on the big bull and sell your cattle for a higher price! Here’s me with my younger sister who is 15 months younger. It was the first time we went to the huge Denver Stock Show with our prized bull, Elevator. Later I would show off bulls and heifers all around the US. I would miss about a month of school every year, but have a number of shiny big belt buckles to show for it. We also had one to two big annual cattle sales a year. Public speaking skills and an ability to sell were expected from me from a very young age. I was the oldest and learned all the business skills. We also did plenty of entertaining. That exposure and experiences I received in my early years stood me in good stead later in life.
I was drawn to horses from a very young age. Horses are a lot of fun to ride and I had a natural affinity to their sensitive intelligence. My mom tells a true story of when I was two. She must not have been watching me closely as I had escaped from a locked yard and gone down the hill into the horse pasture. They found me trying to climb up Dan, which was my dad's horse (they had sat me earlier for a photo) trying to get on for myself. Fast forward a few years when we had a herd of ponies. I could get a cow halter on and climb on them. So I started to ride our herd of unbroken ponies, both the stallions and the mares. And while I wasn’t organizing the breeding, we would have new little pony foals every year that I loved. Here is a photo with my mom, myself, my sister and one of our colt pony foals we called Diamond.
More complicated activities with horses
When we moved to Montana, there was a lot of stress on my parents as my grandfather was sick and my father’s brothers had moved away. Both my parents were working a lot. When I came home from school, I would entertain myself by catching one of the ponies (typically unsupervised) and ride it around. The rule was that I had to be home either when I was hungry or by dark. And if I wasn't home by dark, they would go around honking. If I could hear them honking, I had to come home.
I also trained the ponies to drive with an old cart using a pony harness I found in the barn. My grandfather had used them when he was a kid. The ponies I trained never got to be as famous as the Budweiser Clydesdales, but I am proud that six little stallions I trained to drive were sold to Domino's Pizza. That money, with the accrued interest became my college fund. The ponies showed up in parades like this one in Austin, MN in 1987 – Getty Images has a video version here.
My sister also liked riding, but for her it wasn't as much of a passion and more for helping to move cattle. She also didn’t like riding the complicated or challenging horses. My grandfather was always really proud that I could ride the horses that would buck off the hired hands. He used to say my first words back when I was a toddler were “me can do it.” My sense of adventure has never waned.
In Montana, I never got further than five miles from home. The ranch in Montana was in the Bitterroot Valley, which is relatively narrow. We would go swim in the river but we weren’t allowed to cross it with the horses. In Wyoming, in contrast, I would take off all day. I could easily go 20 miles from home riding all day bareback into the mountains with the wild animals. Of course, we did not have cell phones back then. The only rule I had was to tell my grandparents which direction I was headed so they knew if they had to come get me which road to drive. And I was instructed to listen for the honking, and that was my sign to come home. I kind of told them, "Hey, I'm headed east”. Or West. My grandfather's ranch was very large and I had my places I stashed things if I wanted to go rest, I created my quasi-Native American experience. My family founded the town of Hyattville, Wyoming where ancient cave drawings and petroglyphs are tourist attractions. I claimed a few caves where nearby I could tie the horse to a tree. Some of the ranch hands were Native American and they would tell me stories of the wilderness. It was very cool to learn different cultures at a young age.
Whatever happened, I somehow had to manage. If the horse fell in a hole or I encountered a dangerous situation, I was on my own. I always say that built an independence, courage and a problem-solving capability at a super young age. People ask me “You moved to DC when you were 17? You had lived in London by the time you were 19? And started working in Venezuela in your early 20s, or did trips to Saudi and China in your late 20s/early 30s” And my reaction is “Well, it actually didn't seem that much different from when I was going in the mountains in Wyoming on my own.”
I have always loved a challenge. In those days, I was often the only woman in the room in the telecommunications or technology business. Plus, I had decided by the time I was 13 that I would not be daunted by what I had heard at some of the ranches that “men wear the pants in the family.” Playing also built confidence as I was very good at sports, even against the boys.
School, college and a busy growing up
As I got older, riding horses remained my relaxation. I was playing varsity by the time I was a freshman at school and I was very competitive at volleyball, soccer and track. In my freshman year, I was one of the best basketball players in all of Wyoming. Even though I'm not that tall – I'm 5'8" – by nature, I had an amazing vertical jump, so I was more like a 6' or 6'1" player. That made me more versatile in a variety of activities. However after my first ACL injury at 15, I lost much of that vertical jump. As the reality set in that I would never be 6 foot tall on the court, my focus switched to academics. I had other knee surgeries from other sports as I continued to compete. However, after the second ACL at 25, it became even more apparent that competing with the help of horses was a better alternative.
Fortunately, I graduated at the top of my class with more than a 4.0 because of all my AP STEM classes. I benefited from being well rounded. I had also played “first flute” in our high school concert band. All this allowed me to get into Georgetown in Washington, DC with an early decision application. (Pragmatically, I am sure it helped being a woman from a lightly populated state where many people don’t leave.)
As many of you know, Georgetown is a basketball school (I was there when the legendary John Thompson was coach and his alums would come back to visit in the offseason), my family knew the politicians in Washington, DC from our state, and lastly it was also a Jesuit school (I was raised Catholic). So off I went to DC and the School of Foreign Service. I loved the classical education alongside STEM classes and the international atmosphere at Georgetown. Of course, it was the heart of both business and government and close to the horse community in Virginia and Maryland. I had considered Stanford my Dad had gone for a bit after Whitman College – but Stanford has no horses. Same with many east coast schools.
Polo
When I went east to Georgetown, I wasn’t able to go home as often, and for the first time in my life I did not do much riding. While I played plenty of pickup ball, I also started playing polo for the Georgetown women’s team. I also did some fox hunting and eventing.
Georgetown allowed me to play, not just watch, polo (Sheridan, Wyoming is one of the only places in the West that has a real polo team, and had made me curious about the sport). We played Harvard, Yale, UVA and other schools with a polo tradition. I loved it because it was, again, a team sport. It is competitive, fast-paced, athletic, and I'm not afraid of physicality. I was a “two-goaler”. At that time, I think there was only two of us on the entire Eastern Seaboard that had that ranking.
With all the international exposure at Georgetown, it was an easy decision to spend my Junior year at the London School of Economics. In London, I was playing basketball and not polo, but I was not far from great polo players and polo matches including events where members of the Royal Family participated.
If you want to see how physical the sport is and the hand-eye coordination it requires watch this video of the US Open Men’s Polo. I do sometimes wonder if I had stayed with polo would I have been one of the few five-goal female players.
Horses and polo also led me to my first job working for a high net worth family (also very successful in international business) that sponsored the Georgetown women’s polo team. We also started one of the first GSM cell phone companies in the world. I joined them right after school at 21, ran my first company by 27, and was running or overseeing their entire 40 or so operating and investment entities by 30. All the international travel led to my meeting my husband, Michael.
I loved polo, but with increased travel for work, even being employed by a family with their own polo team, I needed a change. Through eventing, I picked up on the challenge of dressage. Dressage was a sport I pursued when we moved to Europe. I could compete at a high level - Grand Prix class - while still developing my career and getting my international MBA.
Dressage
Dressage has been described as the highest form of horse training with roots in Ancient Greece (the first recorded writings about it are ‘On Horsemanship’ by Xenophon circa 350 BC) using it as a form of training for horses in the battlefield. It was carried forward as a tradition at the Imperial Spanish Riding School of Vienna, which dates back to the 1570s. It wasn’t till 1912 when dressage became an Olympic sport. In 1921, the International Federation for Equestrian Sports was founded, and today, there are 136 national federations that are affiliated.
The year 2003 was auspicious - I got married and Michael, my husband took a job in the Netherlands. I was able to work from there part-time. I bought my first dressage horse after my jumper/eventing horse sadly died in quarantine while getting ready to fly to Europe. I had a lot to learn about training and competing to go from being a really good rider to being a really good dressage rider. It took almost eleven years for me to go from my first dressage horse to training and competing at Grand Prix. Below is my Escobar, my first Grand Prix horse and a former licensed stallion when we were competing in Germany. Escobar had moved with me from the Netherlands to the US, back to England and then to Germany alongside my work. He was quite a world traveler and competed with me across three countries.
Dressage also appealed to my competitiveness since there is never a perfect score of 100%. Acing a dressage test is much harder than at regular school. But it keeps you striving for perfection. Here are the scoring guidelines from the US Dressage Federation.
Two decades later, I have continued to compete at dressage. Here I am with my second dressage horse, and from whom by embryo transfer, I bred my third Grand Prix horse and first licensed stallion. In this video, we are doing a freestyle dressage where a rider can choreograph music and the pattern. The score I received for this test is one of the highest I have ever achieved. I ranked third in the country that year across all freestyles at that level. It was especially satisfying because I was also running a publicly traded software company at the same time
Breeding
My interest in breeding comes mainly from my family legacy. But it also comes from a desire to manage the economics of dressage. Top horses can cost in the hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions. Breeding isn’t cheap by any means but you have a lower cost basis for the quality of horseflesh I want to train and develop. I have bred my own horses that have gone up to Grand Prix, but I've also bred International Grand Prix horses, stallions, test winners and top performing mares. Over time, we also started breeding Giant Schnauzers who are wonderful farm and home companions.
Cattle breeding has evolved what are called EPDs (Expected progeny differences), which are numerical scores with tolerance and confidence intervals that match to certain types of genetic or lineage-type traits.
European warmblood breeding, especially in Germany, has similar types of analytics available going back decades and, in some cases, centuries Most of my mares have very old and long Hanoverian mare lines, which are called stamms. I use those as data points in addition to my own experience riding and training my mares. Most breeders don’t ride the mares they breed with. That gives me a “leg up” with my own assembled data points to complement the information on the given stamms.
When I started breeding, I started scoring what I felt as a rider, what the horse was good at, what they weren't so good at. I do similarly with teams at work. Whether breeding, training, or growing companies, I like to take a nuanced view that relies on math, sensory skills, partnership and inspiration.
As you can see my love of horses has allowed me to apply principles in business, improve on a wide range of STEM skills, become better at time management and keep myself physically active.
In technology you are always striving for dream teams - training, collaborating, managing, leading. It’s the same in a partnership with a horse that will take at least a decade if one wants to get to Grand Prix. With horses, it starts when you are thinking of a foal, effectively in “stealth mode”. Once born, you start evaluating how closely it meets expectations. It’s quite similar to what happens with a startup or a new invention. You monitor the foal’s growth and development. You make sure it has appropriate food and nutrition, similar to working capital and talent in a company. You start to ride the horse as a three year old. Then the real work begins. if you are fortunate, when it gets to be 10-12, the horse gets a shot at its first Grand Prix. If it is good enough, it may even qualify for the Olympics or other international horse sport. It’s like creating a software unicorn where every step has complications, successes and challenges. Whether developing great software companies or Grand Prix horses, you need a commitment to excellence, enough money, enough time, and of course talent, resiliency and hard work.
The little cowgirl in me would love, of course, to go spend long days riding in Wyoming. Now I spend fewer, but very high-quality, hours with my horses in Florida. It is wonderful that I can do so much more while nurturing my enduring relationship with man’s faithful friend, the Equus ferus caballus
Follow Marne and her horses at the Facebook page for her farm and on Instagram
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