CORPORATE PROFILE: Stratosphere Management Group is a senior executive consultancy with 14 top globally experienced executives providing consulting services in 40 industry verticals.RESPONSIBILITY PROFILE:I lead the AI & ML practice, providing consulting services to Fortune 500 clients.

CORPORATE PROFILE: A $6.2M AI / MI company with 110 employees. RESPONSIBILITY PROFILE: In my most recent role as CTO, I reported to the CEO with a $7.5M OPEX and 43 employees with three direct. I was responsible for driving core technical strategy, contributing to corporate strategy, leading tech teams (product, engineering, and research), building customer relationships, and developing methodologies for interfacing with large enterprises/emerging AI startups.ACHIEVED IN THIS ROLEML DEVELOPMENT• Competition outpaced Alegion with machine learning (ML) technology. To lower labor costs, I resolved to integrate ML into the company’s platform. I assembled ML Engineering and research teams, identified the best integration cases, partnered with the product team to analyze labor hours, and built initial proofs-of-concept. These efforts resulted in the first ML model (automotive damage analysis for insurance companies) proof of concept. The ML engineering and research teams worked with the product engineering teams to integrate ML into other platform features, lowering COGS by 40-60%.NEW PRODUCT STRATEGY / DEVELOPMENT• I determined to pivot the product strategy after COVID forced a RIF, as my investigation revealed that video was the fastest-growing segment in AI/ML. We shifted focus to creating the definitive annotation stack for video-based computer vision. Over 9 months, I worked with product managers to pinpoint requirements, led the technical strategy for supporting video, and identified pain points. The product became industry-recognized and secured several $1M+ deals for use in retail, premise security, healthcare applications, and more.

CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT / SPONSORSHIP CAPTURE• To elevate account growth and sponsorship capture, I reorganized staff, built peer-level relationships, and integrated into account teams. I attended weekly customer calls and customer visits to elevate expectations, then assigned executive sponsors to all marquee accounts. This grew bookings from $250K to $1.2M, expanded reach at Fortune 10 retailer from two to four groups, increased sales by 30% with a key Fortune 1000 vacation rental client, and secured sponsorship from a Fortune 500 technology giant. We ended our first year at $1.1M across four Bus at this Fortune 100 technology giant.REGULATORY COMPLIANCE STRATEGY• To preserve business with major retailers, SOC2 compliance was required. I attained CEO approval to lead the charge and sourced an external auditing firm to assist. I selected vendors, communicated needed changes to the tech team, worked with cross-functional leadership to create the roadmap, assigned ownership, and recruited a new compliance executive. Within nine months, achieved SOC2 Type 1 certification followed by Type 2 certification in Feb 2023, which successfully maintained all previous accounts.

RESPONSIBILITY PROFILE: As VP of Product, I reported to the CEO with a $1M OPEX and six employees. I was responsible for crafting the product roadmap, hiring engineering leaders, and building the engineering team.ACHIEVED IN THIS ROLEARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE / MACHINE LEARNING• We discovered an opportunity to shift the company’s focus towards AI/ML in creating labeled datasets. I obtained CEO/Board-level approval to execute. Over a few weeks, I led a market/competitor analysis, built a product roadmap, and began crafting a data annotation-specific feature roadmap. We won accounts with large retailers like a Fortune 1000 vacation rental company and a Fortune 20 retailer and began to build new features in real-time. Alegion became recognized as a leader in the AI/ML data annotation space as a result.GO-TO-MARKET STRATEGY / PLATFORM ENGINEERING / DEVELOPMENT• Post-pivot to AI/ML, determined a complete rewrite of the platform was necessary despite a lack of engineers and the need to continue supporting clients on the old platform. Over the following 18 months, I assisted in vetting a consultancy, worked with the consulting CTO to identify specifications to bring the platform in-house, hired and trained a new in-house engineering team, and led execution. This effort resulted in a commercialized product, secured an initial $800K contract with Fortune 1000 vacation rental company and drove $1M in revenue within 365 days.CULTURAL TRANSFORMATION• I spearheaded efforts to transform the company’s culture, which included recruiting a Head of Engineering and a leader to focus on culture. We collaborated to align hiring, engagement, and performance management practices to the company’s mission and values of trust, collaboration, passion, autonomy, impact, and innovation. Then, we established conducting culture-fit interviews as best practice. This initiative lowered attrition to under 5% (the industry average is 20%), and Alegion won Austin’s best workplace in 2019.

CORPORATE PROFILE: A $2M Enterprise Software start-up company with 60 employees. RESPONSIBILITY PROFILE: In this role, I reported to the CEO with eight direct reports. I led and defined the product strategy and product groups, drove the go-to-market activities for launches, and handled customer interactions.ACHIEVED IN THIS ROLEPRODUCT DEVELOPMENT• The company lacked product development/launch experience, and a deep-dive analysis led to the creation of an organizational planning process. Over six months, I hired new product managers, partnered with Marketing on building a go-to-market strategy, and launched N|Solid, an enterprise-grade implementation of the Node.js runtime. This process and product established the company as an industry leader, which eventually led to securing more funding and customers, such as Walmart and PayPal.

CORPORATE PROFILE: A $4B Technology company with 14,000 employees. RESPONSIBILITY PROFILE: As Director of Product Management, I reported to the Senior Director of Product Management with a $4M OPEX, $2M CAPEX, and 40 employees with five directs. I was responsible for leading the product and service teams.Drove acquisition of Cache IQ: Drove business justification for acquisition of the network-based caching and analytics company. Acquisition minimized development and provided a fast time-to-market for a critical migration product. The acquired IP provided a rich technology platform for future innovation.

RESPONSIBILITY PROFILE: Here, I reported to a Director of Engineering with eight employees. I was responsible for building migration products and tools to drive further company growth. I also developed a data migration appliance that achieved global success. I leveraged this success to persuade leadership to establish a dedicated product development team where none existed before. Thus, I recruited a Program Manager and Business Development leader, defined and executed the data migration strategy, and led product and service and engineering teams. I assumed leadership of the data migration BU focused on competitive NAS and SAN storage take-outs, established KPIs, and created standardized service offerings with dedicated product, services, and engineering teams in the US and Bangalore to facilitate. This program led to the development of two critical hardware products (DTA2800/Rapid Data) that generated $245M in revenue between 2012-2014, and the program still exists today.ACHIEVED IN THIS ROLEDATA MIGRATION• NetApp needed a long-term product solution to remain competitive, so I obtained SVP approval to intervene immediately. Within nine months, I developed a new product introduction process, hired additional resources, developed specs for the OEM search process, selected QLogic, and worked with them to customize a product (DTA2800) with global reach. This first-of-its-kind product for the company was an essential element in the success of the migration program.MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS• No data migration solution existed for the largest NAS accounts, which caused customer churn, and previous solution attempts failed. The VP of Product Ops charged me to restore order. My investigation revealed CacheIQ as a viable option, so I presented and won sponsorship to acquire CacheIQ for $100M. I then relocated to Austin post-acquisition to foster synergies. As a result, NetApp’s largest customers were able to migrate to the next-generation platform.

RESPONSIBILITY PROFILE: When I started for NetApp, I reported to the Director of Professional Services and functioned as lead consultant for complex SAN implementations and heterogeneous data migrations.