My Bio
I was born and spent much of my childhood in Appleton, Wisconsin. I have never really considered myself a Wisconsinite, though, as my parents are former New Yorkers (and I was fortunate to spend 2nd grade and 8th grade living in London).
My entrepreneurial career began in 9th grade when I sold custom-made tie-dye T-shirts for $12 each under the name "Tie-Dye and Otherwise". At the time I thought my margins were very high because I had never actually had a job, so I didn't consider the hours I put into each shirt as part of my costs. But, in retrospect, selling those one-of-a-kind hand-made shirts folded and nicely packaged in a plastic bag (with a business card) taught me a great deal about business.
In high school I joined the debate team. Debate taught me many things at an early age: Team work, research, public speaking, policy analysis, competition, problem solving, and critical thinking. I achieved competitive success, winning the State Championship and taking 3rd speaker (out of 400) at the national tournament in high school and continuing in college, where I was a quarterfinalist (out of 200) at the national tournament.
I attended Macalester College, a small liberal arts school in St. Paul, Minnesota. I majored in Political Science with a History minor. I graduated Magna Cum Laude and was invited to become a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Pi Sigma Alpha (the National Political Science Honor Society). My Senior Honors Thesis was about the Internet becoming part of the mass media.
I became particularly interested in the Internet in 1994. At the time "dot-com" was not a term most people had heard. I became fascinated in the Internet as a culture and a new media paradigm. The more I learned about the Internet the more I realized that it was not enough to simply read and write about it. The beauty of the Internet is that anyone can be a publisher because barriers to entry and the learning curve are so low. So, I learned HTML and started building.
I started Nicenet with a long-time friend and colleague in 1995. At first, the goal was to spread the word about this incredible new thing called the Internet. We went out and started gathering interesting articles and interviewed some luminaries, including John Perry Barlow and Nicholas Negroponte. Our next project was to help new Internet users by pairing them with experienced netizens in a mentor/mentee relationship. Our grand ambition to be the harbinger of a great societal transformation was tempered by a dose of reality after a while.
In the mean time, I took a job at Creative Internet Solutions (CIS), one of the first web shops to build web applications. As fate would have it, the founder of CIS, was living with J.J. Allaire, founder of Allaire Corporation and creator of ColdFusion, a web application server now owned by Macromedia. So, I was lucky enough to be there at the beginning of ColdFusion, which has proven to be fortuitous in my career thus far. At CIS I learned the fundamentals of consulting, database design, application development, sales cycles, and basically how a company becomes a company.
Emboldened by my new knowledge of ColdFusion, Nicenet took on creating the Internet Classroom Assistant (ICA), a web-based classroom tool for teachers to use with their students. The ICA was born from the ideals I hold about the Internet. Our first version was launched in 1996 and used by one classroom at Macalester. Today, the ICA continues to be used by classrooms around the world. Last semester we had over 17,000 regular users of the system in more than 30 countries. Building and supporting the ICA has taught me about product lifecycles, customer service, brand relationships, and the pitfalls of production application support.
In 1997 I was ready to get out of the Midwest and make my way to Silicon Valley. At the time the Internet hype was starting to get hot, but for me I was interested less in the gold rush and more in the culture (and the climate after being in Minnesota for 4 years!).
I found my opportunity in Palo Alto with the Center for Strategic Technology (CST), then a part of Andersen Consulting (now Accenture). At the CST I was part of the Executive Workshop Team, where executives of large organizations would pay large sums to come in for a couple days and have us tell them about the future of business. Basically, we put on high-tech theater, complete with scripts, props, lighting and, of course, some really cool toys donated by every hardware and software vendor you could think of. Although I was with Andersen a very short time, it made an indelible mark on my career. When I left Andersen Consulting I remember being asked "You know this is a Partner-track job, right?" I did, indeed, but I knew I was on a different path.
I moved to San Francisco and joined Roundpeg (which was called Virtual Shopper Inc. when I started), a small custom web shop. Together with my colleague, I became a major shareholder and built what we called the "project development" team. Our team was responsible for understanding the business needs of our customers and translating them into production web applications. I had the opportunity to develop skills in team leadership and account management, all while learning about clients from start-ups to Visa International. I was able to use my ColdFusion skills to help position Roundpeg as one of the key partners for Allaire Corporation in the Bay Area, conducting numerous sales seminars and professional training courses.
My entrepreneurial itch needed scratching, and I set off to do my first true startup. We incorporated a technology and strategy consulting firm called ChangeMedia, Inc. in October of 1998. We were fortunate to start with two great clients, Interbox (part of International Asset Systems) and Cellular One in the Bay Area (now part of AT&T Wireless). We grew the team by hiring a developer, a salesman, and an office manager. Our most lucrative sales channel was secured when we became a Premium Value-Added Reseller for Allaire Corporation (one of the early members of that program). I learned (lived!) the true meaning of cash flow and P&L.
Things were humming along nicely when I got a call from an old mentor one day. He had sold Creative Internet Solutions to Control Data Corporate (CDC) and wanted me to come back to Minnesota to train some of their people. It turned out the trip was much more than a simple training exercise. He wanted to start a west coast office of CIS and wanted ChangeMedia to become that office. We decided that doing what we were doing but with more investment and support was a good idea, so we sold our assets to CDC and picked up ChangeMedia and turned it into CIS West. We inherited a couple veterans from CDC and hired another 8 people. In addition to managing the team and being responsible for the P&L of the west coast, during this period I had the opportunity to work on a product lifecycle tracking application for Cisco Systems and create and conduct a road show for the launch of a new product for Allaire Corp.
Meanwhile, CDC was purchased by Syntegra (part of British Telecom). The irony of a small group of entrepreneurial types working for one of the world's largest companies was not lost on us. That, combined with a desire to move beyond consulting in my career, led me to leave Syntegra in February of 2000. In retrospect, I left right before the bubble burst, so perhaps it was all for the best.
I then took 3 months off. During this time I traveled to Spain, spent time with my fiancée (now my wife), and worked on Nicenet. My time off also gave me a chance to reflect on what I had learned in the short, but fast-paced time since graduating from school.
In the summer of 2000 I began looking around for the next great project. I ended up spending time working on a nascent project called AllBranding, which was to be an online portal for branding. Although AllBranding never got legs, I did get to do a lot of research about brand development and the needs of companies large and small in this area. I became friends with one of the other people involved in the project and continued the market research.
In February of 2001 I co-founded Branuity, Inc., a software-as-service company providing a web-based platform to assist growth companies with brand strategy and market positioning. The process of creating Branuity was an incredible set of experiences, from idea to business plan to angel funding to production application to customer success stories.
Unfortunately, it was not meant to be. A variety of factors prevented us from raising our next round of financing in late 2001, and after giving it a go for 9 more months after that I stepped out of my full time role. Today, Branuity continues on a different path as an "unconsulting" firm, and I stay in touch as an advisor.
After Branuity I decided to get an MBA. After a year doing independent consulting I enrolled at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, where I focused primarily on entrepreneurship and technology. While at Berkeley I created the New Venture Fellows program, a select group of MBA students who work with venture capitalists and help aspiring entrepreneurs in the UC Berkeley ecosystem. I was also co-chair of the 2005 UC Berkeley Business Plan Competition, VP of Technology for the 2005 Global Social Venture Competition, an organizer of the local round of the 2005 Venture Capital Investment Competition, and a Program Associate for the youth mentoring program Young Entrepreneurs at Haas. I was awarded one of two Price Institute Fellowships in 2005 and the 2006 The Gloria W. Appel Award for Outstanding Leadership in Entrepreneurship.
My summmer at business school was spent at Apple working in Developer Relations. My primary projects were creating an MRD for next-generation offerings to the Student Developer market and creating a market brief on possible strategies for addressing the Enterprise Application Developer market.
I spent an extra year at Haas as an "Innovation Fellow" -- a 1-year post-graduate fellowship writing case studies about entrepreneurs and doing outreach to the venture and entrepreneur community. During the Fellowship also did some work for a couple venture funds, including a project for a new fund helping them pull together an industry landscape and investment filter/hypothesis document for fundraising. During that time I also founded and led the PitchLab for STIRR.
In 2007 I worked on the advertising platform at VideoEgg where I helped launch their first embedded video ad product, and in 2008 I was the VP Marketing at Redux, helping them reposition the company. Investors in Redux suggested I move to another of their portfolio companies, Kinfo - there I ran product management until the company went through a major restart/recapitalization and was reborn as Trumpet.io.
I am currently a partner at Hotel Delta, where we are working mostly on conumer applications for touch-screen devices as well as providing consulting and advisory services to startup leaders.
If you are interested in talking more, contact me.
My entrepreneurial career began in 9th grade when I sold custom-made tie-dye T-shirts for $12 each under the name "Tie-Dye and Otherwise". At the time I thought my margins were very high because I had never actually had a job, so I didn't consider the hours I put into each shirt as part of my costs. But, in retrospect, selling those one-of-a-kind hand-made shirts folded and nicely packaged in a plastic bag (with a business card) taught me a great deal about business.
In high school I joined the debate team. Debate taught me many things at an early age: Team work, research, public speaking, policy analysis, competition, problem solving, and critical thinking. I achieved competitive success, winning the State Championship and taking 3rd speaker (out of 400) at the national tournament in high school and continuing in college, where I was a quarterfinalist (out of 200) at the national tournament.
I attended Macalester College, a small liberal arts school in St. Paul, Minnesota. I majored in Political Science with a History minor. I graduated Magna Cum Laude and was invited to become a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Pi Sigma Alpha (the National Political Science Honor Society). My Senior Honors Thesis was about the Internet becoming part of the mass media.
I became particularly interested in the Internet in 1994. At the time "dot-com" was not a term most people had heard. I became fascinated in the Internet as a culture and a new media paradigm. The more I learned about the Internet the more I realized that it was not enough to simply read and write about it. The beauty of the Internet is that anyone can be a publisher because barriers to entry and the learning curve are so low. So, I learned HTML and started building.
I started Nicenet with a long-time friend and colleague in 1995. At first, the goal was to spread the word about this incredible new thing called the Internet. We went out and started gathering interesting articles and interviewed some luminaries, including John Perry Barlow and Nicholas Negroponte. Our next project was to help new Internet users by pairing them with experienced netizens in a mentor/mentee relationship. Our grand ambition to be the harbinger of a great societal transformation was tempered by a dose of reality after a while.
In the mean time, I took a job at Creative Internet Solutions (CIS), one of the first web shops to build web applications. As fate would have it, the founder of CIS, was living with J.J. Allaire, founder of Allaire Corporation and creator of ColdFusion, a web application server now owned by Macromedia. So, I was lucky enough to be there at the beginning of ColdFusion, which has proven to be fortuitous in my career thus far. At CIS I learned the fundamentals of consulting, database design, application development, sales cycles, and basically how a company becomes a company.
Emboldened by my new knowledge of ColdFusion, Nicenet took on creating the Internet Classroom Assistant (ICA), a web-based classroom tool for teachers to use with their students. The ICA was born from the ideals I hold about the Internet. Our first version was launched in 1996 and used by one classroom at Macalester. Today, the ICA continues to be used by classrooms around the world. Last semester we had over 17,000 regular users of the system in more than 30 countries. Building and supporting the ICA has taught me about product lifecycles, customer service, brand relationships, and the pitfalls of production application support.
In 1997 I was ready to get out of the Midwest and make my way to Silicon Valley. At the time the Internet hype was starting to get hot, but for me I was interested less in the gold rush and more in the culture (and the climate after being in Minnesota for 4 years!).
I found my opportunity in Palo Alto with the Center for Strategic Technology (CST), then a part of Andersen Consulting (now Accenture). At the CST I was part of the Executive Workshop Team, where executives of large organizations would pay large sums to come in for a couple days and have us tell them about the future of business. Basically, we put on high-tech theater, complete with scripts, props, lighting and, of course, some really cool toys donated by every hardware and software vendor you could think of. Although I was with Andersen a very short time, it made an indelible mark on my career. When I left Andersen Consulting I remember being asked "You know this is a Partner-track job, right?" I did, indeed, but I knew I was on a different path.
I moved to San Francisco and joined Roundpeg (which was called Virtual Shopper Inc. when I started), a small custom web shop. Together with my colleague, I became a major shareholder and built what we called the "project development" team. Our team was responsible for understanding the business needs of our customers and translating them into production web applications. I had the opportunity to develop skills in team leadership and account management, all while learning about clients from start-ups to Visa International. I was able to use my ColdFusion skills to help position Roundpeg as one of the key partners for Allaire Corporation in the Bay Area, conducting numerous sales seminars and professional training courses.
My entrepreneurial itch needed scratching, and I set off to do my first true startup. We incorporated a technology and strategy consulting firm called ChangeMedia, Inc. in October of 1998. We were fortunate to start with two great clients, Interbox (part of International Asset Systems) and Cellular One in the Bay Area (now part of AT&T Wireless). We grew the team by hiring a developer, a salesman, and an office manager. Our most lucrative sales channel was secured when we became a Premium Value-Added Reseller for Allaire Corporation (one of the early members of that program). I learned (lived!) the true meaning of cash flow and P&L.
Things were humming along nicely when I got a call from an old mentor one day. He had sold Creative Internet Solutions to Control Data Corporate (CDC) and wanted me to come back to Minnesota to train some of their people. It turned out the trip was much more than a simple training exercise. He wanted to start a west coast office of CIS and wanted ChangeMedia to become that office. We decided that doing what we were doing but with more investment and support was a good idea, so we sold our assets to CDC and picked up ChangeMedia and turned it into CIS West. We inherited a couple veterans from CDC and hired another 8 people. In addition to managing the team and being responsible for the P&L of the west coast, during this period I had the opportunity to work on a product lifecycle tracking application for Cisco Systems and create and conduct a road show for the launch of a new product for Allaire Corp.
Meanwhile, CDC was purchased by Syntegra (part of British Telecom). The irony of a small group of entrepreneurial types working for one of the world's largest companies was not lost on us. That, combined with a desire to move beyond consulting in my career, led me to leave Syntegra in February of 2000. In retrospect, I left right before the bubble burst, so perhaps it was all for the best.
I then took 3 months off. During this time I traveled to Spain, spent time with my fiancée (now my wife), and worked on Nicenet. My time off also gave me a chance to reflect on what I had learned in the short, but fast-paced time since graduating from school.
In the summer of 2000 I began looking around for the next great project. I ended up spending time working on a nascent project called AllBranding, which was to be an online portal for branding. Although AllBranding never got legs, I did get to do a lot of research about brand development and the needs of companies large and small in this area. I became friends with one of the other people involved in the project and continued the market research.
In February of 2001 I co-founded Branuity, Inc., a software-as-service company providing a web-based platform to assist growth companies with brand strategy and market positioning. The process of creating Branuity was an incredible set of experiences, from idea to business plan to angel funding to production application to customer success stories.
Unfortunately, it was not meant to be. A variety of factors prevented us from raising our next round of financing in late 2001, and after giving it a go for 9 more months after that I stepped out of my full time role. Today, Branuity continues on a different path as an "unconsulting" firm, and I stay in touch as an advisor.
After Branuity I decided to get an MBA. After a year doing independent consulting I enrolled at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, where I focused primarily on entrepreneurship and technology. While at Berkeley I created the New Venture Fellows program, a select group of MBA students who work with venture capitalists and help aspiring entrepreneurs in the UC Berkeley ecosystem. I was also co-chair of the 2005 UC Berkeley Business Plan Competition, VP of Technology for the 2005 Global Social Venture Competition, an organizer of the local round of the 2005 Venture Capital Investment Competition, and a Program Associate for the youth mentoring program Young Entrepreneurs at Haas. I was awarded one of two Price Institute Fellowships in 2005 and the 2006 The Gloria W. Appel Award for Outstanding Leadership in Entrepreneurship.
My summmer at business school was spent at Apple working in Developer Relations. My primary projects were creating an MRD for next-generation offerings to the Student Developer market and creating a market brief on possible strategies for addressing the Enterprise Application Developer market.
I spent an extra year at Haas as an "Innovation Fellow" -- a 1-year post-graduate fellowship writing case studies about entrepreneurs and doing outreach to the venture and entrepreneur community. During the Fellowship also did some work for a couple venture funds, including a project for a new fund helping them pull together an industry landscape and investment filter/hypothesis document for fundraising. During that time I also founded and led the PitchLab for STIRR.
In 2007 I worked on the advertising platform at VideoEgg where I helped launch their first embedded video ad product, and in 2008 I was the VP Marketing at Redux, helping them reposition the company. Investors in Redux suggested I move to another of their portfolio companies, Kinfo - there I ran product management until the company went through a major restart/recapitalization and was reborn as Trumpet.io.
I am currently a partner at Hotel Delta, where we are working mostly on conumer applications for touch-screen devices as well as providing consulting and advisory services to startup leaders.
If you are interested in talking more, contact me.