I'm CEO and a co-founder of Backdrop Health, Inc., a health informatics company launched in Salt Lake City in 2020. Backdrop aims to make medicine more proactive and personalized instead of reactive and generic. We do this with a new way of applying 'big data' and machine learning to electronic medical data of all kinds, to discover disease signatures and provide precise medical outcome predictions and patient risk-scoring. Backdrop's solution is intended for pharmaceutical companies that want to accelerate their clinical trials, front-line health care providers, and insurers and payers, and can improve human health and cut the cost of health care. Backdrop is commercializing technology developed at The University of Utah by our co-founder and Chief Science Officer, Prof. Mark Yandell, and his team. I’m also an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at The U, where I’ve been focused since mid-2017 on software for the life sciences, an area of world-class innovation from The U, The U Hospitals, and the associated Huntsman Cancer Institute.

Achilles Heel Technologies (www.aht.ai) was founded by two MIT PhDs, to offer a unique new solution for the cybersecurity market. The company uses cutting-edge mathematical techniques to model complex cyber-physical-human systems, and discover where hacking or other attacks could cause the most damage. AHT can help government and enterprise customers protect critical infrastructure, in defense, finance, air-traffic control, refining, manufacturing, and more.

Flybits offers its unrivaled contextual recommendation engine to let financial institutions deliver hyper-personalized products, offers, and content that their customers actually need. Flybits, based in Toronto, was spun out of Ryerson University in 2013 by Founder and initial CEO Dr. Hossein Rahnama. I joined and served as CEO (based in Palo Alto) and then as Executive Advisor after we decided not to continue to build up the US operation. As CEO I:- Focused the company on creating a single true SaaS product and enabling the founding technical team to implement its compelling product vision;- Launched our context-as-a-service platform in September 2015 at (Finovate in NYC) and released it in October 2015. - Completely revamped the core positioning and marketing messages, and greatly simplified pricing.- Grew sales while shifting from a mix of pure services and perpetual licenses to 70%+ SaaS subscription revenue in 2015.- Maintained a maniacal focus on product simplification, including publishing our revamped SDKs for iOS and Android in late 2015, releasing RuleBuilder in April 2016, and adding self-service onboarding.- Won selection by Gartner as one of its four 2016 Cool Vendors in its platform-as-a-service category.

Schooner was acquired in June 2012 by SanDisk Corporation, the largest pure provider of flash memory storage (sales over $6 billion). I spent six months running Schooner as a unit in SanDisk's Enterprise Storage Solutions division, with the title VP, Database Products. SanDisk is an excellent company but was not for me. Schooner was founded in May 2007 to develop database and data store software that would deliver 10x server consolidation by fully exploiting multi-core x86 servers and flash memory. Schooner was funded by Redpoint (John Walecka) and Menlo Ventures (Mark Siegel). I joined as CEO and 31st employee as Schooner was Beta testing its first products. • Led the March 2010 launch of our first products: two turnkey Schooner Appliances (one for the SQL database market and one for the NoSQL data store market) that packaged our unique software with commodity flash drives on standard IBM x86 Linux servers.• Constructively and without penalty got Schooner out of a worldwide distribution deal with IBM when it became clear that IBM would be ineffective at selling our Appliances.• Remade Schooner into a pure software provider to overcome the flaws of our initial Appliance model. Moved "cold turkey" to software, stopping Appliance sales in August 2010, to let engineering focus and deliver two new software products (SchoonerSQL™ and Membrain™) in February 2011. Customers ran these on their own Dell, HP, or IBM servers using flash drives (SSDs) from any vendor, expanding our market and cutting the payback time from buying our software to a few months.• Slashed monthly expenses by 60% to fix the bloated cost structure I inherited. This bought time to change our business model, launch our new software products, and close deals. Schooner needed no new funding after its July 2009 Series B. • Turned a direct competitive relationship with Fusion-io into an effective marketing and sales partnership after moving to pure software.

Agitar was founded in August 2002 to automate the practice of unit-level testing and create a "software knowledge company" that would do for software development what Google did for search. Our first product, for in-house use by the Global 2000’s software development teams, cut by 50% the cost of maintaining Java applications and reduced bugs by up to 90%. This was an enabling step toward our vision of bringing big data to software development through cloud-based collection and analysis of vast amounts of Java source code, tests, and developer changes to both. Agitar was funded by Sequoia Capital (Doug Leone), NEA (Peter Morris), and Globespan (Venky Ganesan). I joined Agitar’s Board in October 2002, and became CEO and 16th employee in July 2003, pre-product. Agitar was acquired by McCabe Software in July 2008.• Delivered four years of sequential growth to total sales of $23m (80% from subscription-based licenses), earning the business of over 250 customers worlwide. • Redefined our products, moving from an initial desktop product to a server-based product family for in-house use by corporate customers and to power our cloud-based offering (which attracted 20,000 users in the academic and open source communities). • Recruited a superb executive team including VP for Asia-Pacific who ran a $100m region for IBM Rational, VP for EMEA who ran a $120m region for IBM Rational, VP for Americas who ran an $80m region for Wind River, and VP of Marketing from SAP. • Persuaded the leading open-source guru relevant to our market to join as the first Agitar Fellow, a very potent marketing tool that we artfully used for four years. • Led very successful Series B ($12.6m) and C ($10m) financings.• Personally negotiated with the opposing CEO the settlement of an expensive, acrimonious, and unwarranted patent infringement suit. Our corporate counsel described this as the most impressive and favorable settlement to a patent dispute that he had seen in 30 years.

NightFire was founded in October 1997 to develop Operations Support System (OSS) software to automate the processes by which telecom carriers buy and sell circuits and services from one another. NightFire was funded by Sequoia Capital (Mike Moritz), NEA (Peter Morris), USVP (Jason Green, now at Emergence Capital) and Technology Partners (Ira Ehrenpreis). I joined as CEO and 36th employee when NightFire had two customers and $500k in revenue. I led NightFire to profitability in its last three quarters on annual revenues of $25m in spite of the worsening telecom depression, enabling a sale to NeuStar (NYSE: NSR) in August 2003.• Turned down $3.1m in pending deals, which were distracting custom projects, to enable focus on our software product strategy. This let engineering deliver a 2nd-generation platform in January 2000 that greatly increased customer satisfaction, reduced development and deployment costs, and enabled larger deals and entry into new market segments.• Closed important early deals including $1.4m in June 1999 with UUNET, then a major Internet service provider. Established major indirect channels including OEM deals with Nortel and Lucent and an integration services deal with IBM Global Services.• Devised a unique SureFire™ deployment guarantee in which our customers would be able to take live orders using our software after 30 business days, when the deployment of competitive products took 6 to 9 months.• Aggressively developed new products for new sectors as many sectors of the telecom carrier market disintegrated. From our start serving new DSL providers such as Covad and Rhythms Networks we extended our market to fixed and mobile wireless carriers (including a $6.5m deal with AT&T Fixed Wireless) and incumbent carriers like SBC.• Led very successful Series C ($30m) and Series D ($10m) financings.

Rational (NASDAQ: RATL, now IBM Rational), which became the most successful ISV in the software development product market, was a 10-year old private company when I joined. I led marketing during Rational’s growth from $28m in FY 1991 (March) revenue to $412m for FY 1999 and from 190 to 2,300 people. Rational’s market cap of $3 billion in April 1999 compared to $70 million when it became public in March 1994.• Responsible for product management and strategy, corporate marketing, and marketing communications / lead generation for Rational’s full line of products and services.• Refocused Rational’s product strategy, killing some products and creating others that better leveraged core competencies. Repositioned the product line in terms of "Rational Control", emphasizing risk reduction and faster time-to-market instead of product features.• Led the definition of Rational Apex, the UNIX-based successor to products that ran on proprietary hardware while providing 99% of revenue in 1991. Moving off of proprietary hardware was life-or-death for Rational. Devised marketing programs that kept revenues growing for eight quarters on the proprietary hardware products while Apex was created and launched. Drove the successful transition to Apex, which has since generated total sales of over $600m.• Took on marketing in June 1993 of Rational Rose, then a struggling new entry in 8th place in the fragmented market for visual modeling software. Determined user requirements, analyzed competitors, focused engineering, and built a Rose marketing team. Rational Rose became the market leader with 1998 revenues of $80m and 6 times the share of its nearest competitor. • Wrote the marketing / strategy sections of the S-4s for Rational’s acquisitions of Verdix in March 1994, SQA Software in February 1997, and Pure Atria Software in July 1997. Wrote the SEC filings for two secondary offerings which raised a total of $217m.

Alsys was a French-based software development tools company focused on the defense and aerospace markets. I joined as a Product Manager and a year later became VP, Marketing and Customer Support. Alsys grew from annual sales of $4m to $22m and was acquired by Thomson CSF.