San Francisco & Austin, California - United States
IndustryComputer Software
Bio
I am an incurable optimist and a startup entrepreneur. I am currently the CMO of Vapor IO, where we've created the world's most cost-effective way to build out and manage edge computing. I specialize in being the "first-in" senior executive at a startup, partnering with the founding team and a strong CEO to take a company from stealth to stratosphere. I am a generalist with skills ranging from recruiting to product management, although my super-power is early-stage marketing and my speciality is building marketing teams from scratch. Most recently, as part of the early executive management team at Mesosphere, I helped take the company from its R&D days in 2014 (literally, 11 engineers in a Potrero Hill condo) to a fully operational product company with a world class marketing team, generating significant revenue. Except for a brief hiatus into real estate investment, I've spent my entire career in technology. I co-founded two venture-funded companies, including the publicly-traded interactive television company Wink Communications (IPO, NASDAQ). I was CMO of Heroku, co-founder and CEO of 1000 Markets, and SVP Marketing at Desk.com (acquired by Salesforce). I ran product management, product marketing and customer support at Geoworks (NASDAQ IPO), and helped take the company into the interactive television space which led to my co-founding of Wink Communications. I served on the national board of the Trust for Public Land for 7 years. Also, I was Chairman for Commonweal Communities, a non-profit housing developer. I studied philosophy, rhetoric and linguistics at UC Berkeley. I am a professionally-trained chef. I ran a small, indie concert series in the Presidio. I've been an editor of a magazine. I've programmed Atari video games in 6502 assembly. And I did a 5 year (award-winning) stint investing and restoring historically- and architecturally-significant high end real estate in Los Angeles, Miami, Coral Gables and Palm Beach.
I am good at
Early stage marketing, category creation, product launches, strategy