About

My career in the tech world started during my junior year of high school when I bought a modem and started using BBSs and soon after, the internet via a UNIX shell account. I taught myself how to work in a UNIX environment and how to ‘surf’ the internet (which back then meant using something like Gopher – yup, I’m old 🙂 with the tools available at the time.  This was pre-web browser days, folks!

I came to know some of the folks at my local Internet Service Provider (ISP), called TIAC, where I rented my shell account, and that led to a summer internship with one of the first ISPs in Atlanta. My job? Customer support, sales, account setup and administration, and whatever else I could find that needed doing. It was just me and the 3 founders and I learned a lot about technology and myself that summer.

When I came home after the summer break to start my senior year of high school I took a job with the local ISP, which at the time was one of the biggest ISPs in the Northeast US with PoPs all over Massachusetts and the NY Metro area. I spent about 5 years there (through end of high school and during summers and breaks from college) working in a variety of roles including customer support and technical operations. If you needed anyone to edit DNS zone files or hack on an /etc/passwd file, I was definitely your man 🙂 In college I kept at it, working in a bunch of tech related jobs at school and over the summer where I focused on system and network administration.

During my senior year of college when I was thinking about ‘what next’, I knew I wanted to do system administration work and fortunately I had the opportunity to join a couple of (at the time) high flying Internet consultancies of the day, Scient and Viant. I also had a more ‘stable’ career option available –  go to Goldman Sachs and join their IT infrastructure organization.  I chose Scient and was staffed on some great projects over the 2 years I was there, helping to plan, build, and operate large and complex web infrastructures for Chase Bank and Major League Baseball. Lots of Sun hardware, Oracle software, and working weekends in various data centers in Long Island and Staten Island.

I enjoyed working at Scient but as the economy trended downwards in 2001 and the company was downsizing, I saw the writing on the wall and started to look for a new role. Around that time, I happened to receive a call from one of my former colleagues who had just been hired as CTO to rebuild and relaunch FOXSports.com, one of the largest sports websites on the Internet. He needed someone to build the IT infrastructure and ops team. Sensing this was a great opportunity for me at this early stage of my career (pay to move me to sunny LA, give me a big raise, and let me manage a team of engineers = no brainer!) I subleased my apartment, packed up my stuff, and moved to LA for a couple of years. FOXSports.com was the first place where I had to hire and manage my own team while still maintaining lots of responsibility for doing technical work. While at FOXSports.com, I learned quite a bit about technology management and vendor management (and stress management!), but more importantly about how to manage and motivate people.

In your career, you’ll sometimes make decisions based on personal rather than professional reasons. My career is no exception to this rule. My girlfriend at the time (now my lovely wife and mother to my wonderful children) was accepted to graduate school in New York and so we needed to find a job that would get us back to New York.

While I was still in LA, I started searching for a new gig and stumbled upon a job (via the Scient alumni network) with a then little known startup software vendor — VMware. They needed someone to fly all over the US and Europe to help customers use their data center virtualization software. You needed to know UNIX, and you needed to like being on the road. Being about 25 at the time, it sounded like fun. I had no idea what kind of company VMware would become – I was just in the right place at the right time.  Over the years I had the privilege of working with an awesome global team, many of whom have gone on to other startups or start their own. More importantly, this job helped me get over my fear of public speaking.

VMware was a rocketship ride and if I stayed I could have kept growing with the company, but I had always wanted to go back to school to pursue a graduate degree. After a lot of hard work and a grueling application and reapplication process, I was thrilled when I got the call (a day I will never forget) to attend Columbia Business School. I joined the Columbia’s January Term (J-term) program in 2007 (I blogged extensively about the Columbia J-term program here) and had an amazing 16 months of learning and networking while I worked extremely hard towards my goal of breaking into the venture capital industry. After graduation and a lot of sweat and tears, I received a couple of job offers, one with a fund-of-funds, and one with an early stage VC firm in NYC.  I chose the latter and spent a year evaluating early stage IT and internet investment opportunities while also providing assistance to our portfolio companies with business development, fundraising, and marketing. I’ve documented many of the things I learned in that process via my Venture Capital Jobs and Careers page located on my personal blog as well as in the Venture Capital Careers eBook I wrote.

Unfortunately, the market crashed in late 2008, and for the next year it was not a great time to be in the VC business given the massive contraction going on in the economy and in the startup community. I was learning a lot and really enjoyed the work. However, it was clear to me that our firm (along with about 80% of the other VC firms in the US) was not going to be able to raise a new fund in that kind of economic climate, so I began to search for a new role.

One of the first emails I sent when I started looking for a new role was to a VC who had sponsored an independent study project that I conducted while in business school. It turned out he and another investor had just funded a team of experienced entrepreneurs to build a virtualization management platform with some heavy duty technology backing it up. They needed someone to come in as the first business hire to do whatever was needed to help acquire the first customers and get the product launched. I joined the company and spent the next year or so helping to acquire the first customers, build the inside sales team, and launch the product to the market.

After that, I moved over to Amazon Web Services and led business development efforts for their Big Data platform service. I worked closely with our sales teams and product teams to evangelize the service and our Big Data strategy to the market. About 2 years into my AWS stint I transferred into Amazon’s display ad platform business, where I worked in a hybrid client analytics-product management role.

I left Amazon in April 2014 to co-found a software startup in the Human Capital Management space called HireNurture. We’re making software to let recruiters automate how they interact with passive candidates – people who might not be looking for jobs at the moment the recruiter reaches out to them.