Summary
Visionary technologist and high-performance systems architect. Serial entrepreneur with a focus on areas where new developments make novel businesses feasible. Proven builder and leader of highly effective teams. Demonstrated ability to recruit, motivate, and inspire technical staff. Builder of engineering organizations which collaborate effectively with the entire business.
Intimate experience with:
- Virtual worlds
- Social software
- Knowledge discovery, search, information extraction
- Large-scale distributed systems
- Information security
Experience
CEO, Founder
Subutai Corporation, San Francisco, CA and Seattle, WA. (January 10 - present)
Company is currently in stealth mode.
Partner
Volvox Associates, LLC, San Francisco, CA. (August 07 - present)
Provide technology-driven strategy, management & analytical consulting and program management services to clients in the US Intelligence Community. Also provide strategy and interim engineering management services to clients in consumer electronics, interactive entertainment, consumer online services, and venture capital.
Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer
Smith & Tinker, San Francisco, CA. (February 07 - Sep 07)
Helped to define strategy, products, businesses, and acquire funding for the first major connected toy company.
Advisor
Various Organizations, San Francisco, CA. (January 01 - present)
Serve as strategic and technical advisor primarily to startup and other early-stage businesses. Assist with identifying technology risks and opportunities, implications of emerging research on market development, and strategies for achieving early-stage goals.
Vice President of Engineering and CTO
Atom Entertainment, Inc. San Francisco, CA. (June 04 - January 07)
Brought new vision to established engineering group. Set research and development priorities for the company, keeping it current with new technology. Formed corporate strategy with other members of executive team, ultimately resulting in company's sale to Viacom in September 2006.
Tore down department's existing engineering structures and replaced them with cutting-edge best practices while more than doubling the size of the department. Designed and led development of a new state-of-the-art in-house multiplayer game platform.
Chief Platform Architect
Perpetual Entertainment, Inc. San Francisco, CA. (June 02 - June 04)
Designed and led implementation effort to build a server platform for the efficient, reliable, and secure hosting of multiple massively multiplayer online games. Continuously adapted platform design and implementation to swiftly-changing requirements.
Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer
Xigo, Inc. San Francisco, CA. (February 98 - June 01)
Co-founder and founding VP of Engineering of a startup which developed real-time unstructured text and numeric analysis applications and services for use in brokerage, banking, personal finance, and content publishing markets. Users included Web Street Securities, JPMorgan Chase, E*Trade, and Merrill Lynch.
- Contributed to corporate strategy as a member of executive team.
- Supported acquisition of venture funding and recruiting of world-class board of directors, executive staff, and advisors.
- Hired initial engineering team and grew engineering, QA, and IT departments to a total of approximately 45 people before hiring replacement VP of Engineering and moving into CTO role.
- Spoke at industry events. Won the IDG "Demo God" award.
- Served as senior sales engineer, supporting closure of all major account sales, venture funding, and licenses.
- Invented several technologies which were key components of the company's intellectual property, and which resulted in eleven patent filings.
Senior Engineer
Consensus Development Corporation (Certicom). Berkeley, CA. (October 97 - September 98)
Researched, designed, and developed leading commercial information security and cryptography products.
Senior Research Scientist
Apple Advanced Technology Group. Cupertino, CA. (October 90 - October 97)
Confidential research involving design and implementation of algorithms and interfaces in the domains of information retrieval and message filtering. Applied for several patents involving algorithms and user interface technologies, some of which have issued. Much of this work has been productized in MacOS.
Primary research areas:
- Concept extraction / information retrieval
- Novel user interface concepts
- Applications for new devices and new technologies
Programmer & Designer
Thought I Could, Inc. (1990-1991)
One of three co-authors of commercial software Wallpaper, for Macintosh. The software allowed editing, installation, and randomization of desktop patterns.
Programmer
The Perseus Project. Harvard University. (May 88 - May 89)
Designed and programmed Pandora-- a Macintosh application to search Greek literature on CD-ROM.
Programmer
Language Systems, Inc. Providence, Rhode Island. (May 87 - January 88)
Designed and programmed a spelling checker for the Italian language. Designed and programmed other projects involving spelling checking in Spanish.
Education
Brown University
Sc.B. in Cognitive Science.
Publications and Patents
Selected publications and patents available here.
Interests and Activities
Martial arts, including aikido (second degree black belt), kyudo (first degree black belt), archery with the Western recurve bow, and historial European martial arts, especially Bartitsu and longsword study. Rock climbing. Yoga. Human languages, including Japanese and Putonghua. Making music on anything, lately mostly wind instruments including shakuhachi and didgeridoo. Maori poi. Reading fiction and watching film. Cooking things and making other people eat them.