Crowd Cow's mission is to help people discover and access the highest quality craft beef and meats, and to bring people together - farmers and consumers, families and friends.This all started when a friend said "I'm so excited! I'm getting my cow this Friday." He then went on to describe how much better the beef tasted and how proud he was to support the farmer directly. I wanted that too — and he wouldn't share! Ethan suggested we create a site to virtually meet the farmer and to crowdfund a single cow. The rest is history.https://www.crowdcow.com

Due to personal family medical reasons, we made the decision to close the company and return funds to our investors. I am grateful to my co-founders and for the support of our investors.I co-founded and served as the CEO of Blueprint AI, a company that aimed to create an AI Agent Technical Product Manager. We raised a $3m pre-seed and were working with a dozen design partners at the time of closure due to medical emergency.

ThinkFuse, Smore, VendorHawk, ...

Madrona Venture Labs (http://www.madronaventurelabs.com/) is a startup studio funded by Madrona Venture Group. Together with a talented team, we identify opportunities, build the products, get the initial traction, recruit exceptional teams and help secure financing before spinning them out as independent companies.Our first company, Mighty AI (https://mighty.ai/)was an AI data management platform for autonomous vehicle perception data with funding led by New Enterprise Associates, Foundry Group and Madrona Venture Group and was acquired by Uber.

oDesk acquired MediaPiston in September of 2011.

With MediaPiston, I created a 2-sided crowdsourcing marketplace for high quality content, bootstrapping from scratch to cash-flow positive using minimal resources and no outside funding. The system included a software process control system, home-grown reputation system and hundreds of freelance writers from the US, UK, Canada and around the world. I started this as a solo founder working nights and weekends while still full time in my prior role at WhitePages and over time built a small team of incredibly talented software engineers early in their careers to help.Within a year or two the kinks had been worked out and we had established a two-sided marketplace with decent liquidity (~$85K / month). Around that time I received interest from each of the two largest online work marketplaces to buy the company to integrate into their marketplaces. It may have been the wrong choice but in the end rather than continue to bootstrap and grow the company organically, I decided to sell MediaPiston to oDesk in September of 2011 where I joined as VP.

After WhitePages acquired Snapvine, I headed up the 55-person technology team covering engineering, operations & IT. Beyond that, I took on corp dev and hired the company's new head of HR, setting the goals for each of those areas.Working with the talented team, we set ambitious goals around significantly improving the infrastructure, process, team and culture of engineering:Process: moved the company from waterfall to agile and increased the frequency of deployments by over 35x.Technology: ported to ruby on rails, rebuilt the entire data center.Team: upgraded the tech team throughout, implemented an internship program with close ties to UW CSE and reformed the company's interview process.Culture: empowered major decision-making at the individual contributor and lead level, and pushed successfully to rewrite the company's values. Changed up touch-points including all hands meetings, company lunches, company website and more.

Making sure Snapvine achieves ambitious goals. Update: sold!

Negotiated deals with J-PHONE, KDDI and NTT DoCoMo to use the Openwave Mobile Browser and related technologies in their products for Japan and European markets. Spent around 20% of my time in Japan, 80% in Redwood City, CA. Took two years in the middle to get an MBA at MIT Sloan School of Management.

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