My professional story

Resumes tend to be what they are suppose to be – a list of jobs, dates, companies, accomplishments and skills.  The more interesting story version is often between the lines or covered during interviews.  I thought I’d write a few stores down here, but let me know if you want a copy of my resume.

I’m currently the CTO and one of the founders of Linkable Networks where we are building a card linked offer business platform called MyLinkables.  It is a pretty complicated cloud based, highly scalable platform that integrates into several points along the financial industries’ transaction rails as well as a number of open API interfaces for partners to integrate their advertising interfaces into our solution.  There is a complete Web 2.0 consumer application available as well.

Previous to Linkable Networks, I was the CTO of Pangea Media, an online marketing company and the leading provider of quiz-based advertising solutions for advertisers and publishers.

Before Pangea, I was CTO at Spring Partners, where we built a highly scalable Web 2.0 consumer application, Springpad that assists in managing life events.  This is an AJAX based application that resides entirely in Amazon’s cloud computing environment – EC2, S3 and makes extensive use of Java, Spring, GWT. MySQL, Memcached, Apache/Tomcat, Solr, and JMS based technology.  It turned out complicated for average users, but powerful for the techie crowd.  I learned many important lessons here, maybe none as much as that simple is very hard to build.

Before building consumer applications, I was the CTO of a mobile advertising company, Third Screen Media, acquired by AOL in 2007 for 33 times our revenue after which I led the technology organization while the business grew ten fold.  Our platform, MAD-X, routinely responded to over 1 billion mobile requests per month from mobile publisher such as Verizon Wireless, ESPN, Discovery Channel, Major League Baseball, The Weather Channel, Virgin Airlines and T-Mobile.

Before my mobile technology days, I led a couple Professional Service organization for enterprise-class and SaaS-model software start-ups including Performaworks (funded by Pequot Venture Capital, now Firstmark  Capital) which was acquired by WorkScape and Idiom Technology (funded by Greylock, NorthBridge and Sigma Partners) which was acquired by SDL International.  My teams built world-class custom software for companies such as Walmart, Oracle, Microsoft, General Motors, Federal Express, Bank of America, Eaton Corporation, Seagate, Morgan Stanley, Johnson and Johnson and AT&T.

Prior to that, I entered the world of venture back software start-ups in 1999 – Revenio, which I co-founded and managed the Professional Service organization where we built an innovative engine for executing very sophisticated, interactive, long-running multi-channel marketing programs. We sold our solution to over 25 customers, including Analog Devices, Agilent, Boise Cascade, MicroStrategy, National Semiconductor and Vail Resorts. Revenio’s patented flagship product is now shipping as Vignette Dialog.  Revenio was venture funded, with Tim Barrows at Matrix, Ted Dintersmith at Charles River Ventures and David Fialkow at General Catalyst as the primary investors.

Before VC backed software, I built my own self-funded software consulting company, The Clarity Group starting in 1992.  Along with several employees, we built some amazing software during a time that technology was evolving rapidly.  In the early days, we wrote Windows 3.0 software in “C”, thanks to the teaching of Charles Petzold.  We quickly graduated to Borland C++ and made quick use of client-server technology to build many financial software products – Electronic Trade Entry systems, Proxy Voting systems, Derivative Portfolio Management systems – for companies like Fidelity, State Street Bank and First National Bank of Chicago to name a few.  Later in that decade, we rode the early Internet waves by building some very cool intranet applications for some insurance companies and Microsoft.

After college, I worked for 3 years in Raytheon’s radar system’s lab as an electrical engineer – we built microwave (no, not the kind that you cook with) and antennae components for various systems like the Patriot Missile, Aegis Missile and several air traffic control systems.  I built some software that mathematically model waveguide component performance before fabrication cutting down on some extremely expensive trial and error iterations – lots of fun and very, very geeky.

When I was 17 (yes, in high school), while I was working (baking croissants starting at 4:30 AM) at Au Bon Pain’s Airport location,  I wrote software on an Apple II+ that kept track of inventory and reconciled cash with their distribution.  They bought the software from me ($1500, which was awesome for a few days of work by a high school punk) and hired me to write all their accounting and inventory management software while I went to UMass/Amherst.  This turned out to be a great learning experience at a very young age, plus this work paid for the entire college tab.  I probably should have skipped college and stayed with ABP (now Panera Bread) – probably would have been set for life by now.  Geez.