After spending a good part of my career working for big companies like AT&T, IBM and Control Data Corp., I found my niche in early stage companies. I started nine companies, nearly all high-tech and venture-funded. Typically my role was co-founder and CEO, raising capital and driving rapid early progress. I was good at getting the right people on the bus, the right people off and figuring out where to drive the thing. My most recent and last start-up roles were as CEO and co-founder of PhoneTell and before that, Krugle, Inc. PhoneTell was a comprehensive cloud-based contact database for mobile devices and Krugle (sold in 2009) was a search engine for source code. I was the CEO of BigFix which was sold to IBM in 2010, and on the founding teams of CitySearch and Net Perceptions which both went public. A more complete business profile is on LinkedIn here.
Business Articles
- What’s Hot and What’s Not (PDF): November, 2006 – This piece in BizTech Magazine quotes me on IT skills and hiring practices.
- Things Will Never Be the Same: After the tech crash of 2000-2001, I tried to pull my thoughts together into a book, tentatively titled What Were We Thinking. The following would have been the first chapter. It describes the heady time when people were just beginning to talk about the possibilities of the Net, before venture money began pouring in and before everyone began to think about “getting big fast.” The time frame is October, 1996… [more]
- Electronically, We’re All Neighbors. In October of 1997 I was asked to speak about online communities at the Camden Technology Conference, the precursor to PopTech. A “hot topic” at the time, computer users had started to form interest groups online around everything from politics to cars. The event gave me the opportunity to think back to the early 1980’s when the idea of meeting and communicating over a computer first appeared. [more]
- Memo to Rob Kost. In February of 1995 Scott Kurnit had joined Prodigy. His approach, ideas and willingness to acknowledge facts gave me hope that perhaps the company was not really doomed. Being to timid to approach him directly, I wrote the attached memo to my colleague, Rob Kost, and copied Kurnit. I’ve no idea if he ever saw or read it. Reading it now turns out to be quite a good bit of fun and I think some of the ideas I captured here turned out to be right.