Math alum Bill Fahrbach rides a rapid wave of success as a CFO in the technology world

A few years after Bill Fahrbach (B.S. ’02, mathematics; B.A. ’02, economics) graduated from the University of Maryland, he had a tough decision to make: should he stay on a path toward a career in business or give it all up to become a professional musician.

“It was either music school to be a jazz musician or business school,” he recalled. “I loved music and played guitar in bands throughout college and a musical career was definitely tempting. All my bandmates had already moved out to LA and became musicians, I was the only holdout.”

Though music would always be a part of his life, Fahrbach decided business was a better career choice.

“I realized that although I love music, I would never be happy without the challenge of the business world,” he said. “You can’t just chase what feels good at the moment, you have to chase what’s going to continue to fulfill you.”

Fahrbach’s decision to pursue business paid off. Honored with numerous awards, he has risen to rockstar status in the technology world for his success as a financial leader and advisor, guiding big and small tech businesses through exponential growth, acquisitions and highly profitable selloffs for over 10 years.

In his current role as chief financial officer at Facet Wealth, Fahrbach restructured and rebuilt the finance team, launched a data and analytics program, and raised more than $150 million in just 10 months, with more growth still to come, all setting the stage for a future IPO. It’s a high-stakes, high-return career that fits perfectly with the kind of challenges Fahrbach loves most as well as his passion for mathematics and problem-solving.

“I’m in an executive role that requires me to consider the interests and personalities of various stakeholders, internal and external, but at the heart of it I’m a corporate problem-solver, it’s what I do as a CFO of technology businesses,” Fahrbach explained. “I love solving problems. In my college math classes that was really appealing to me—every question was, ‘Here’s an issue, solve for the problem.’ It’s very exact, it’s very fact-based and I just enjoy going through that logic chain and getting to an answer.”

Starting early with math

 For Fahrbach, it all started with mathematics. Growing up in Long Island, New York, he gravitated toward math early on.

 “I was always good with numbers and logic,” he said. “I excelled at a young age and it kind of came naturally to me.”

 When Fahrbach entered the University of Maryland, he initially leaned into electrical engineering and economics, seeing law school and a career as an intellectual property attorney in his future. But as time went on, he realized he was more interested in problem-solving than circuit theory. And just before his junior year, an internship at Morgan Stanley convinced him he’d found his niche.

 “It kind of blends all the things I was interested in. It’s business, it’s sales, but it’s also detail orientation, analytics and all those things that I really enjoyed,” Fahrbach noted. “When I took the internship and loved it, I said to myself, ‘This is something I can see being really excited about.’”

 Realizing that math and economics would put him on a solid track toward investment banking, Fahrbach changed his major to math and soaked up as much as he could before graduating in 2002.

 “I had a lot of great mathematics professors at Maryland,” he recalled. “They had a terrific program and they taught me so much.”

From UMD to Wall Street

From UMD, Fahrbach went on to Wall Street and his first job at Standard and Poor’s.

“I worked in leverage lending, analyzing the debt markets,” he said. “It was great training on how the finance world and the capital-raised world work and it helped me understand business and run analytics in a way that was relevant.”

Fahrbach joined a Credit Suisse spinoff firm in 2005, working as an investment analyst until 2007 when he moved to Merrill Lynch. For Fahrbach, it marked a fork in the professional road.

“I thought, do I want to be a lifetime institutional finance person, or do I want to take the skills that I’ve acquired and help individual businesses directly,” he recalled. “I learned that what I really enjoyed was the challenge, the problem-solving, and working with people to optimize outcomes. When I sat down with executives in fast-growing businesses and saw them grapple with key strategic business decisions, it was just really exciting.”

By 2007, the appeal of an advisory role in business was so strong, Fahrbach put his career on hold to earn his MBA. The timing was pivotal.

“I was in business school during the financial crisis of 2008 to 2009 and the world changed in those years,” he explained. “You had a lot of great people pursuing nontraditional, more entrepreneurial paths, whether it was starting a business and growing it and raising venture capital or entering private equity-backed businesses, which is what I do now.”

Earning an MBA launched Fahrbach into a new role working closely with tech businesses, from Iris Wireless, where he managed mergers and acquisitions, to Oragenics, a health technology company where he advised executives on major strategic decisions.

“In 2010, I was brought in to Oragenics to work with the Board and CEO to figure out how to best monetize their assets,” Fahrbach said. “We launched their consumer products division from the ground floor, then spun it out, sold it and recapitalized the business, which we later partnered.”

“In many cases in the past, my goal has been to sell myself out of a job”

In 2013, Fahrbach landed his first CFO position at Mobile Commons, a software company where he learned volumes about the inner workings of running a deal process. Hired to position the business for sale in 18 to 24 months, Fahrbach had it sold in just seven months. 

He moved on to WorkWave and achieved another career milestone.

“We more than quadrupled the size of the business in four years,” Fahrbach recalled. “We acquired five businesses, then sold the company, and achieved a great outcome for our investors. It really launched my credibility in the private equity world.”

As he moved on to another CFO role at ComplySci, then another at CultureIQ, each opportunity set the stage for the next.

“You see there’s a pattern to this right? When I sell off to a strategic party, that’s typically my cue,” he explained. “My goal is to sell myself out of a job and go on to the next one.”

When Fahrbach joined Facet Wealth in 2021, it was the right opportunity at the right time.

“It’s been a very intense 10 years, it takes a lot out of you,” he explained. “So the idea of having a four to five-year trajectory to grow and to launch an IPO was exciting to me and a compelling reason for me to accept the challenge.  I love doing deals, but I love operating just as much.”

Fahrbach credits the strong foundation in mathematics he built at UMD and his years of financial and business experience with much of his success. But he admits he couldn’t do this work if he wasn’t passionate about it.

“The world I’m in is not for the faint of heart, it can be brutal,” he admitted. “You cannot slip up and very often there’s a lot of people’s money on the line and they trust you to get a great outcome for them. There’s no way that I’d be able to do this if I didn’t love it.”

After nearly a decade as a CFO, Fahrbach is still hooked on the challenges that drew him to business and finance from the beginning. And he’s still learning every step of the way.

“I thought I was pretty proficient years ago and now I look back and think, I could have been better,” Fahrbach reflected. “So it’s probably reasonable to think that 10 years from now I’ll say the same thing about where I am today. As long as I’m still being challenged and I’m getting better at what I do, I imagine I’ll be fulfilled.”

Written by Leslie Miller

How alum Thomas Geisler transitioned from the U.S. Army to the University of Maryland and a career as a software engineer

In 2013, when many of his friends from the Baltimore area were finishing college or starting their careers, Thomas Geisler found himself in a very different place: a combat zone. In Laghman Province, Afghanistan, even the weather was like nothing Geisler had ever experienced—and not in a good way.

“I was in such a dusty place in Afghanistan that when it rained the raindrops would collect dirt on the way down,” Geisler recalled. “I don’t know how many people can say that they’ve gotten caught in a mud rainstorm, but I have, and it’s not pleasant.”

Geisler (B.S. ’21, mathematics; B.S. ’21, computer science) served seven years as an intelligence analyst and Arabic translator in the U.S. Army, with assignments in the U.S., Afghanistan and Germany. Soon after he left the military, he enrolled at the University of Maryland, where he discovered a passion for mathematics and later, computer science.

Thanks to his UMD coursework and internships and his boundless interest in math, problem-solving and more, Geisler forged a career path that meshed his love for science with the intelligence experience he gained in the Army. Now he’s taking his skills to the next level as a software engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), a position he calls “ideal.”

“I love it. To be honest, I couldn’t ask for anything more,” Geisler said. “Because it has a lot of government contracting, it’s very rewarding and I feel like it’s a career where every day I feel like I make an impact.”

Always reading, relentlessly curious

Geisler grew up in south Baltimore, Maryland. A quiet, introverted kid, he was always reading and relentlessly curious.

“I remember my parents getting frustrated with me taking things apart and putting them back together,” Geisler recalled. “I think I messed with a vacuum cleaner once that never quite got fixed. I was always interested in everything, always tinkering around.”

After high school, Geisler enrolled at Ohio State University, the first in his family to go to college. But once he got there, he had trouble finding his way.

“I was just completely lost, I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” Geisler recalled. “I must have changed majors four or five times, I was in business, and then economics and then I wanted to do languages, then I wanted to do social sciences. And believe it or not, the one thing that I never got into was hard science. The interest was there but I never really thought about doing it.”

After two frustrating years, Geisler decided it was time to change course. He started thinking seriously about joining the military.

“It seemed like an opportunity to step back and put a pause on big things like school and finding a career and reset my life,” he explained. “I was 13 when 9/11 happened and then in my teenage years, you couldn’t turn on the news without hearing about Iraq or Afghanistan. I had friends that enlisted, and it just seemed like something I could do beyond subtle patriotism.”

In 2009, Geisler came home from Ohio State for winter break and never went back.

“I was staying with my parents for Christmas,” he recalled. “And this may sound sort of fantastical, but I remember that it was the first thing that I told my parents Christmas morning. I said, ‘Hey, I’m joining the Army.’ There were two wars going on at the time.”

Deployed to Afghanistan

After basic training in Missouri, the Army sent Geisler to language school in California to learn Arabic, then on to Louisiana to build his analytical skills before he deployed to Afghanistan in 2013.

“It was scary, to be frank, but the anticipation of going there was harder to deal with than actually being there,” he said. “You don’t ever know what’s going to happen.”

In Afghanistan, Geisler tracked insurgent networks to identify significant threats to U.S. personnel.

“I was working the military intelligence mission while I was in Afghanistan,” Geisler explained.
“I was focusing a lot on IED networks, analyzing networks of people that were building and implanting and detonating explosive devices.”

In 2014, after nearly a year in Afghanistan, Geisler came back to the U.S. and then deployed to Germany as a signals intelligence analyst, using his Arabic language skills extensively and identifying threats to U.S. embassies, consulates and others.

Geisler completed his military service in 2017, and headed back home to Maryland to start a new chapter in his life. He applied to UMD, thinking he might major in engineering. But a few prerequisite courses later, everything changed.

“I started doing all the math classes and it just hit me—I realized this was the direction I wanted to go in,” Geisler recalled. “I walked over to the mathematics building and declared a math major.”

Geisler remembers reading book after book on the history of mathematics and the fundamentals of mathematical proof and spending hours picking professors’ brains about their research. Along the way, he developed a deep appreciation for the mechanics and the certainty of problem-solving.

“What I love about mathematics is that many problems can be solved in a variety of different ways,” he explained. “How someone solves a particular problem says a lot about their strengths and weaknesses, and no matter how a problem is solved, mathematics as an extension of formal logic prescribes a method of being absolutely certain that a solution is correct.”

While Geisler advanced his knowledge of math and later added a computer science major, he also volunteered with veterans groups on campus, grateful for the support they had given him.

“Coming back to school as a 27-year-old, I didn’t think I would fit in, but the veteran community at Maryland was awesome, they were absolutely instrumental in helping me acclimate,” Geisler said. “My time at UMD was very much the defining characteristic of this big transition from being in the Army to having a civilian career.”

As time went on, Geisler began to see how the analytical skills he learned in the Army could mesh with his new skill set in mathematical calculations and software development, and he thought APL might be a place where he could apply both. Two summer internships convinced him he was right.

“In my first internship at APL, I was doing a lot of background research for new contracts, then I got another internship the summer of ’21 and I was writing software for projects that were very important to the U.S. intelligence community,” Geisler explained. “In a way, it really mirrored everything I was doing when I was in the Army.”

By the time Geisler graduated in December 2021, he accepted a full-time opportunity as a software engineer at APL. Now he’s developing software for microcontroller and RF geolocation systems, applying the skills he learned at UMD every day.

“Calculus and number theory are essential to much of the work I do, and I use that and many things I learned at UMD on a daily basis,” Geisler said. “Mathematics isn't just about solving esoteric problems; it offers a method of understanding problems and assuring that a solution is grounded in facts and appropriate logical conclusion. At work I often find myself stopping to ask whether I've drawn a logical conclusion or if I've just been sloppy.”

Geisler has come a long way from that dusty combat zone in Afghanistan. Settled down with his wife in Sykesville, Maryland, he looks ahead to the challenges at APL and hopes to go to graduate school someday. And although he may not have taken the traditional path to get here, he’s exactly where he wants to be.

“Despite the fact that I never really had a clear plan starting out and I didn’t necessarily do things with a clear goal in mind, I couldn’t be happier with how it’s all worked out,” Geisler reflected. “I’m proud of my military service, I’m proud to have gone to UMD, I’m just really happy.”

Written by Leslie Miller

Viray (B.S. ’05) is a professor at the University of Washington.

Bianca Viray, a professor at the University of Washington (UMD 2005), has been awarded the AMS Joan and Joseph Birman Fellowship for Women Scholars for the 2022–2023 academic year. The fellowship gives exceptionally talented women extra research support during their mid-career years. The primary selection criterion is the excellence of the candidate's research.

An arithmetic geometer, Viray researches rational points on varieties, particularly how a variety’s geometric properties influence failures of the local-to-global principle. “My research projects are broadly motivated by wanting to understand arithmetic properties of a variety as we extend the base field, and what the sets of points look like over extensions,” she said.

Recently, Viray has studied degree d points, considering solubility over unions of extensions of bounded or prescribed degree. During her fellowship year, she will take part in a program on Diophantine geometry at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute. Viray will also host collaborators including Brendan Creutz of the University of Canterbury (New Zealand).

“I am honored to be awarded this prestigious fellowship in recognition of my research and thankful for my many wonderful mentors, collaborators, and colleagues who have supported me through my career,” she said.

Viray earned her PhD in 2010 from the University of California, Berkeley. She was at Brown University from 2010 until 2014 as a Tamarkin Assistant Professor and NSF Postdoctoral Fellow. She joined the faculty of the University of Washington in 2014. In the 2021–2022 academic year, she is a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

An active organizer in the mathematics community, Viray is a co-founder of the paraDIGMS (Diversity in Graduate Mathematical Sciences) initiative and a member of the board of directors of Girls’ Angle. She is also a member at large of the AMS Council and a Fellow of the AMS. Read a Simons Foundation profile of Viray, who was named a 2020 Simons Fellow in Mathematics.

About the Fellowship

The AMS Joan and Joseph Birman Fellowship for Women Scholars, established in 2017 with a gift from Joan and Joseph Birman, seeks to address the paucity of women at the highest levels of research in mathematics by giving exceptionally talented women extra research support during their mid-career years. The primary selection criterion for the Birman Fellowship is the excellence of the candidate's research. See past recipients and read about their experiences with the fellowship (PDF).

Contact: AMS Communications.

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This article was copied from AMS News: https://www.ams.org/news?news_id=6982