Sano Shimoda:  

Life After graduating from Lehigh University in 1968 with a BS in Business Administration, my MBA at the University of California at Berkeley was interrupted by the draft in 1968. Luckily I did not go to Vietnam. After completing my MBA at UC-Berkeley, I started work as a Wall Street analyst in New York City in 1973 and lived in Hackensack, NJ. I married Joan, who I met in San Francisco, in 1979 and lived in Allendale, NJ. After working for First Boston Corp. in New York, I cofounded a brokerage/investment banking firm in Parsippany, NJ in 1984. In the same year, we adopted a son, Scott from Korea. In the late 1980's, we moved to Orinda, CA in the San Francisco Bay area. After working for Montgomery Securities for a year and a half as a Wall Street analyst, I left big corporate America and worked as an investment banker advising an agricultural biotechnology company in San Diego in the early 1990s. In 1993 I founded BioScience Securities, an investment banking firm that specializes in agricultural biotechnology and the genetic modification of crops. BioScience Securities' office was located in Orinda, CA, so my commute was 8 minutes down the hill. My son is 21 and is currently a junior at San Francisco State College. During 2005, me and my wife, after 26 years of marriage decided it was time for us to go our separate ways and are executing what I call a "class divorce". I moved to the LA area in 2005, and moved into a work/live loft (3 blocks from the beach) in Venice, CA and have downsized BioScience Securities. Believe it or not, I spend a lot of my professional time in the corn and soybean fields of the Midwest, and both I and BioScience Securities have become pretty well known in the field of agricultural biotechnology and Midwest agriculture. A lot of my Wall Street friends have retired, but I wouldn't think of it. I love what I do, which includes a lot of traveling in the U.S., as well as sometimes in Europe, depending on wh...Expand for more