About
Four times a CEO. Two dozen more as the person the CEO calls.
I build, fund, fix, and scale companies, and I have been doing it long enough to know where they break. Today I bring that to a small number of companies at a time, as a fractional operator, an advisor, and a peer.
I have built products used by hundreds of millions of people, raised the capital to fund them, closed the acquisitions, and repositioned companies that had lost their footing. I lead from inside the operating work rather than from a whiteboard, and I have learned that the hardest part is rarely the idea. It is turning strategy into decisions, and decisions into momentum.
§ 01 – The record
Where I have done the job
- COO at Hotmail – grew from zero to 10M users in 18 months; led the $400M acquisition by Microsoft
- Director at Microsoft – helped grow the #2 site on the Internet; closed $150M in ad deals; secured the $265M LinkExchange acquisition
- Co-founder and CMO at Moxie Software – $40M in revenue in two years, $90M raised, acquired five companies, sold
- SVP at Yahoo! – ran a $1B product portfolio; the only Yahoo! division that grew revenue in 2011; converted 93% of 283M users to a new platform
- EVP at LivePerson – repositioned the company; a new analyst program drove a 20% stock-price increase in one month
- CIO at AT&T Paradyne – ran information systems and telecom for a $650M AT&T manufacturing subsidiary, 105 people on a $20M budget; moved the company to client/server and delivered a 1,300-workstation campus network in 15 months
- Advisor at BMNT – currently in my fourth year advising the defense innovation firm, with more than 15 companies over that time
- Fractional operator & advisor – currently working with a small number of leadership teams across dual-use, deep tech, and AI-first operating redesign
- B.A. Mathematics and Computer Science – Dartmouth College
§ 02 – How I work
Operator first, advisor second
Most consultants hand you a deck and leave. I have been on the other side of that deck too many times to do it. I take a seat, own outcomes, and stay until the thing works – whether that is getting ready to raise, a decision process that had stalled, or a company that needs to be redesigned around AI.
I work with a deliberately small number of companies at once, because the value is in depth, not volume. If we work together, you get one senior person who has actually done the job, not a framework and a follow-up email.
Think we might work well together?
Tell me where your company stands. Worst case, you leave with a clear read on the two or three moves that matter most.