Tony Dennis

Tony started out as a farm kid, wrangling cows and working on old farm equipment on a ranch in Sumpter Valley, near Baker City, Oregon. While the air and view were nice, he decided at an early age that building things for a living was a lot safer than helping cows give birth, so he applied to Engineering School at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, Indiana. He received an ROTC scholarship to pay for it (again, reasoning that being in the Army was a lot safer than ranching) and graduated in 1985 with a degree in Mechanical Engineering. He was commissioned in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1985 and spent the next ten years wandering the world doing various and sundry jobs for the Army.

After leaving the Army in 1996, he got a job in Germany for a defense contractor and spent the next four years enjoying beer and schnitzel while learning the craft of building large integrated software and hardware projects for a U.S. Army training center. He gained 20 pounds, but had a lot of fun doing it.

Around 2000, someone recommended Enron as an up-and-coming company, and Tony decided that he wanted even more experience doing even bigger and better things. This lasted for about two years, at which time Gravity finally overcame Enron’s airspeed, and Great Things came to earth.

Older but wiser, Tony and his wife Lisa set up a small consulting company in Portland and have been building Great Things ever since.

Tony flys a 1967 Piper Commanche…when the weather is good.