My Professional (and Slightly Personal) Biography
I'm a seasoned technologist with a focus on emerging products and early stage companies. Simple timing put me in the right place at the right time and gave me several opportunities to shape the Internet during its early days. I started out as an entry level programmer and have continued to work in and around software throughout my entire career.
Where it All Began
To start everything off I dropped out of NYU and joined Chase Manhattan Bank as a contract developer. In the late 90’s anyone who claimed they could program could get a job as a contractor. The team that hired me was a relic of mainframe days, aggregating journals of SLA performance data, analyzing for trends, and reporting it to senior management. This is probably the most boring task any human being can do. I was hired for a three month gig that quickly became open ended to write a tool to perform this analysis. At this point, no-one has ever paid me to write code.
Having no choice but to learn how to write real applications, I learned VB 6. Within a few weeks I had an alpha application, in two months I had this little system that pulled in and normalized the data, ran it through excel algorithms and made the Power Point for management. They loved it, I was three months early, so I got a chance to literally do whatever I wanted. So I wrote web apps…
I quit Chase to work for a web shop called ACG, who was bought by Havas Advertising. We were basically a swat team of web developers who did it all: databases, hosting, coding, graphic design, etc. Havas had us doing product launches for drugs like Celebrex, web sites for the American Bible Society, digital asset management and the web site for the super (evil) chemical company American Cyanamid… and hostile takeovers.
One of my favorite tasks was when Havas would buy a company and we’d take this cart we had into their data centers and literally takeover their servers. First we’d force the datacenter to let us in with court papers of acquisition, then we’d cut off locks with bolt cutters and unplug every network cable. One-by-one we’d rip through servers and systems changing passwords, creating archives, searching for backdoors and copying everything. That was fun.
I'm a Rock 'n Roller
Next I went to MTV and joined the MTV Interactive Group as a senior developer. We took over Imagine Radio, encoded thousands of CDs, streamed more traffic, live events and music then anyone ever (at that time), and set records almost every live event. MTV promoted me to Director of Technology at the age of 23 (one of the youngest in the history of Viacom to reach this level), and by 25 I was the primary inventor on two patents and Director of Technology for SonicNet.
MTV had the clout and brand power for us to get our hands on the latest and greatest technology. From running around and begging the BBC for backup satellite bandwidth to dozens of streaming servers we used to drive around in vans, we really were Internet Cowboys. The audience was so big, and so fickle we had to get in front of them. We sat in cubicles that turned into fancy ass offices and worked 80-90 hour weeks launching the next generation products in Internet entertainment.
Streaming live events and developing web applications for MTV provided the foundation necessary to understand large scale application architectures and high exposure / high reliability environments. After MTV missed the bubble and rolled the dotcoms back into MTV Networks, I moved on and started several different companies and products. I supplemented my startup activity (aka I needed money) by consulting and working development gigs ranging from web sites for art galleries to digital asset management for oil and banking. During this time I worked for or started companies in Houston, Chicago and San Diego all while living in NYC (basically I lived in NYC on the weekends…do you know how hard it is to get an apt in NYC???)
Banking and Security
Following consulting and a variety of personal projects I joined Relegence, a market data firm who was sold to AOL. My responsibilities with Relegence started by managing three cabinets and a dozen or so servers and running office operations. Within two years I secured over $2M in funding and purchased, installed and operated another 75+ servers in a dozen plus racks, some serious EMC storage, 2x dual layered firewalls and 5+ VLANS on a big, Cisco chassis. Within two years the Relegence infrastructure and security capabilities passed the strictest requirements of the international banking community and the company was able to acquire customers such as Merrill Lynch, Fidelity, CSFB, CNBC and many more.
My jobs at both MTV and Relegence included full datacenter operations, and although each company’s customers were drastically different, the responsibilities of the "5 x 9s" were the same. At MTV when we had hiccups we made the news, "CNN announces MTV Online suffers major outage..." With Relegence when our systems went down we had stock brokers and bankers barking into my cell phone and banging down our doors. In both environments I had hands on involvement with all aspects of the network architecture and content delivery and management. It was also my job to document and present all of this information as required for necessary security assessments, corporate infrastructure audits and fund raising / sales.
Move to California and Help Re-Launch Uniloc
I moved from Relegence to Uniloc, a security company specializing in device based identification. My primary responsibility was to architect and build tools and systems to empower software publishers to protect and sell their products how they saw fit. Through extensive hands on involvement with the software community I was able to serve as the bridge between the software vendors and our product engineers leading to the development of the product SoftAnchor.
I started out with Uniloc as a consultant living in NYC and working remotely. I quickly moved to the west coast and joined the 4 man team as the development lead and within a year I was promoted to CIO. My roles with Uniloc allowed me to advance my product development and innovation capabilities while working with some pure entrepreneurial talent.
It was also at Uniloc where I first took on a public role. As the company matured I ultimately assumed the responsibility of being the outside facing person for a very vocal company. I conducted the majority of press and analyst briefings and worked very closely on the marketing and product launch strategies as well as participating in the fund raising and investor relations activities of the company.
Avangate and eCommerce
Uniloc's core product is SoftAnchor, a licensing and DRM tool for Software. While at Uniloc I brokered a partnership with Avangate and after about a year of working together I made another career transition to VP of US Sales for Avangate. Although this is my first official sales title, this is certainly not your traditional sales job. What I love about Avangate is the level of true passion and startup energy. Although the group has been in place for over 17 years, and Avangate has been operating in this form since 2003, the company has more energy and customer passion than any place I have ever worked.
My favorites have always been scrappy startup operations where you have to roll up your sleeves and do just about everything. This blog and site is a collection of projects, ideas and experiences cumulated over the last few years. Some of it is really random, some corporate and some I’m not going to explain.
