Advising, mentoring, and coaching technology startups and corporate venturing teams in the areas of leadership, strategic planning and prioritization, strategic partnerships, business development, negotiation, corporate development, product development, go-to-market, and raising venture capital. Investing in artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, web3 and blockchain startups with strong product-market-founder fit, primarily B2B. Invest principally in seed and some cross stage (pre-seed to series A).

• Mentoring several early-stage companies across AI/ML, robotics, web3, blockchain enterprise cloud infrastructure and retail analytics and—two have recently been acquired and another has raised over $50M.

The Alexa Startups team engages founders and investors through startup programs, business development, and technical support. The Alexa Fund also provides up to $200 million in venture capital funding to fuel voice technology innovation.• Created Alexa’s global startup partnership strategy and executed a plan which led to building strategic collaborations with the most innovative and highest potential startups and, support for each of these important partners with bespoke Amazon business, GTM, technical and financial resources.• These strategic engagements helped accelerate the scale and growth for this select cohort of Alexa startups and led to deep and novel integrations of voice AI into emerging themes and categories, demonstrating the “Art of the Possible” with Alexa.

• Built strategic partnerships with the world’s top 250 highest potential startups, working with each startup's executive team to understand their strategic priorities on technology, products, go-to-market, expansion plans, and other areas of strategic importance and then bring the global resources of Amazon to help accelerate their success and business growth.• These deep engagements led to influencing $745MM in net new AWS revenue, $46MM in AWS migrations and spearheaded 18 internal strategic collaborations with Amazon business units, product teams and corporate development.

Combining machine learning and blockchain to democratize access to AI technology. "AI Democratized"

• Shaped and led the development of a Cisco-wide software and services monetization strategy and framework, driving Cisco’s transition from a largely hardware monetized business to a hybrid product portfolio —monetizing software, SaaS/XaaS, and hardware.• All products and services have been recast into 7 distinct monetization models (reduced from over 100) resulting in software and recurring revenues growing to over $17B—moving from a low, relatively flat single digit growth of $5B in 2014 to double digit growth of $12B in 2016 to $17B in 2017.

The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) is the principal trade association for the software and digital content industry. The Software & Services Division of SIIA (SSD) represents the best software companies and products in the world, those companies that develop the applications, services, infrastructure and tools driving the success of today’s high-tech industry. The SIIA Software & Services Division Board is a volunteer group of industry executives who work closely with the division's team to direct SIIA activities and initiatives for the greater interest of the software industry.

• Pioneered one of the first sensor-based, predictive analytics and engagement platforms for brick-and-mortar retailers—giving them the ability to uniquely identify customers in their store and allowed retailers and brands to actively and personally engage, influence and reward a shopper in real-time at the point of decision. I spun the business out of Microsoft after learning the division funding the project was being downsized.• Funded the company and setup all operations and built an 18-person team from scratch including product development, product management, business development, legal, finance, HR and an advisory board in 60-days.• Formed the product vision and led the development of initial sensor hardware, mobile SDK and data analytics service from raw idea to pilot ready in 6 months—allowing us to develop pilots/POCs with Best Buy, Walmart, Starbucks and Delta Airlines.

• Built "skunk-works" teams of 20-30 people across research, development, UX, program & product management, marketing, business development and product planning to evaluate, design & prototype 7 new business concepts in 4 years (e.g., telepresence, mobile payments, identity management, search personalization, natural language understanding (NLU) and sensor-based analytics/shopper engagement for retailers)• Presented funding proposals and regular project updates to Microsoft’s senior leadership team including the CEO, CTO, division Presidents and their staff—helping to secure $3M-5M in initial funding and required staff & resources for each new venture.• Led four of these early stage ventures with each eventually being spun out into several Microsoft’s business groups—several of these technologies are now included in commercially successful products (e.g., Windows Phone, Windows Embedded, Xbox/Avatar Kinect, Bing Mobile, Cortana, Skype) and one other was spun out of the company (see Tacii).

1998 - 2000 and 2002 - 2008"Boutique” management and business strategy consulting firm focused on supporting new ventures in larger companies and fledgling entrepreneurs in early stage start-ups.My engagements were typically as an interim retained executive and my clients included (see below attachment for engagement details):• Kauffman Foundation – Sr. Director, Business Development & Product Strategy (retainer)• Amazon.com – Business Development Executive for Kindle Platform (Pre-launch) (retainer)• Qpass / (acquired by Amdocs) – Sr. Director of Strategy and Business Development (retainer)• Melodeo / (acquired by HP) – VP of Product Management (retainer)• Loudeye / (acquired by Nokia) – VP of Product and Business Development (retainer)• ReplayTV / (acquired by DirectTV) – VP of Business Development (retainer)

Outride was a spin-out from Xerox PARC that pioneered a service for Search Individualization and Contextualization, making search more relevant, personal and efficient using a multi-modal machine learning inferencing engine.• Created the initial product plans, market requirements, business model, customer prioritization plan and established critical business milestones—which allowed us to successfully engage with 10 pilot customers in the enterprise/intranet search space, consumer search area and trade exchange markets.• Established, structured and negotiated design win, joint collaboration and IP relationships with Inktomi, Excite@Home, eGroups, AOL/Netscape, Google, Lycos and Mercado valued at over $50 MM.• Helped develop M&A plans, in conjunction with CEO and president, leading to successful acquisition by Google—maximizing the ROI for investors.

• Vice President, Product & Business Development (Novita, acquired by PlanetWeb)• Director, Product Management & Business Development (QUALCOMM)• Worldwide Product Line Manager, Enterprise Networking Group (Apple)• Sales Engineer, Major Accounts and Enterprise Resellers (Apple)