As a kid, we would visit my uncle, who worked in chemistry and physics at Bell Labs. When I got old enough, I was able to spend a day with him at the Labs when visiting, where I could see his projects and those of his friends in other departments. I was fortunate to see some cool things, including fiber optics while still under development... Bend the fiber and the laser would shoot out, pretty neat (though I didn’t really know what I was looking at back then)! It was here, with a 3-ring binder with some handwritten notes from Kernighan & Ritchie, that I first learned the “C” programming language. Why was it called “C” you (may) ask? As the story goes, the “B” language wasn’t very good, the next iteration was “C” … that one seems to have done pretty well!

While attending grad school in the 90s I started a consulting practice... well, more accurately, I fell into it. A company I had been working for during my senior year of undergrad, designing hazardous dust particle monitoring equipment (a project I’m still involved with today), asked if I would be willing to continue some work on the weekends when I went off to grad school. Little did I know I would run that consulting practice for more than 5 years.

That experience lead to co-founding my first full startup, as CTO. We started a networking company in October of 2001… great timing right? Well, in hind-sight it actually turned out to be good timing for a variety of reasons, specifically that there was a lot of top talent suddenly available. Available, that is, if you could survive. We designed and manufactured IP video network monitoring equipment leveraging FPGAs, at the very beginning of what is now called Video Streaming or simply Streaming (we engineers creatively called it Network Video in the early days). We built a great team and survive we did! We began with 6 people and grew to a peak of over 180 people across several countries. That company still operates today, as a subsidiary of its acquirer.

Ultimately I enjoy everything from the theory driving a project and its approach, all the way down to seeing it sitting on the bench with a blinking light! I am fascinated by building teams around ideas and a common purpose to bring those ideas to market. A balance of theory, practice, and execution.