Wearing all kinds of hats over the years has given me a diverse skill set and a whole lot of perspective. I’ve learned from enough of my failures to appreciate my successes, and that my best skill is being able to work backward from real-world problems to solutions that move the needle for a business, industry, or community, and creating collaborative, high-performing teams to realize them.
Advisory work, investments, and new ventures I’m incubating.
Transformed a successful software services business into a strategic product-engineering organization: a global team of hundreds, new product, design, and architecture practices, and an AI-native operating model. Driving sustained quarter-over-quarter growth with flagship initiatives at marquee Fortune 500 customers.
Spun out the software arm of Janeiro Digital into two products. XFORM — one of the first commercial systems to integrate enterprise applications and systems with decentralized data, protocols, and identities; and Phactor — a privacy-first federated data network matching global pharma with patients at population scale for clinical-trial recruitment.
Notable customers: the NHS, Novartis, and Novo Nordisk. Notable partners: RSA Security, Inrupt, Accenture, Deloitte, and KPMG.
Co-founded a professional-services firm specializing in massively scalable, data-intensive systems, and pioneered our RADD methodology for the precise delivery of mission-critical software. Grew it 100% organically from day one to a successful acquisition in 2021, with delivery teams across the US, Central and South America, and Europe.
Work ranged from financial trading systems managing billions of dollars to a monitoring-and-diagnostics platform for the safe generation and distribution of power at the largest independent energy generator in the US. Named a Gartner Cool Vendor. Customers included Amazon, Caterpillar, IBM, UTC, and Vistra Energy.
Advising founders on product, architecture, and scaling technology teams.
Advising on technology strategy and product direction.
First technology leader at Appex, an M&A-driven portfolio of 50+ consumer mobile apps and over 150M lifetime downloads — with apps featured by Apple, The New York Times, TechCrunch, Bloomberg, Yahoo News, Forbes, and The Washington Post. Designed and built the technology organization and a platform of reusable services (AI, payments, accounts, attribution, reporting, monitoring). As a member of the investment committee, I developed a data-driven diligence framework — working with our data team to automatically surface acquisition targets and project their performance to drive go/no-go decisions. I then partnered with product and marketing to integrate new acquisitions into the portfolio.
Author, contributor, and editor of open web standards for decentralized data and identity alongside Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web. Contributing author and editor of the core Solid Protocol, co-author and editor of the Application Interoperability and Shape Trees specifications, contributor to Solid-OIDC authentication, and creator of several reference implementations.
Created a system for purchase and payment distribution of digital music — splitting and routing payments across rights holders in a networked marketplace. An early take on problems that decentralized commerce is still working on today. The work and team carried directly into Janeiro Digital.
Invented one of the first systems to detect sophisticated covert channels on a network. [1] [2] Built and led an R&D team that included one of the creators of Kerberos, a co-founder of NetBSD, an astrophysicist, and some of the best hackers I knew. Customers included Bank of America, DuPont, Motorola, and AEP.
My first job in tech, started while I was still in high school — began in technical support and grew into a senior systems engineering role, responsible for systems and network security across a service-provider network. The problems I found here and the solutions I built to address them led to my first startup.