Helping founders, CEOs, CTOs, and other leaders level up their engineering & product functions. I coach, diagnose, bridge gaps, and drive positive change using my 30 years' experience across a broad and deep range of industries, company stages/sizes, and challenges.- Stable Auto - Data-driven tools and insights for planning electric vehicle charging infrastructure. Advisor to CTO/cofounder.- Rutter - Universal API aggregating and integrating many business Saas APIs. Providing executive coaching and helping founders and team leaders diagnose and improve Engineering and Product.- Airbnb - coach to Eng leaders.- Housable - ADU development. Advisor to cofounders.- POSH - In-person social experiences ecosystem. Advisor to cofounder/CPO.- Parade.ai - AI-driven freight logistics. Advisor to Founder/CTO.- Messari - Data and governance for cryptocurrency. Advisor to Founder/Head of Engineering.- Figma - Coach to Engineering Director.- Avail, Inc. - Car-sharing startup backed by Allstate. Advisor to Head of Engineering.- Flatfee (Overseas Operation Services, Inc.) - Fractional CTO and assistance with due diligence.- Stealth Startup - Fractional CTO.- Abine, Inc. (DeleteMe) - Privacy service, removing your PII from the internet. Fractional CTO.

The SF CTO Club is an independent, not-for-profit, invitation-only group of Bay Area technology leaders. Our mission is to make SF an even better place for technology-intensive companies by helping each other, and by sharing our expertise and experience.

Connecting engineering and product leaders with mentorship from experienced folks at companies beyond their immediate circles. Plato was acquired by Coda.io.

Series C B2B/B2C startup enabling amateur sports communication and coordination. Acquired by Waud Capital (private equity) in 2021. Brought in to upgrade engineering.- Drove positive change and established direction via org and technology strategies, OKRs, unified roadmaps.- Established a strong, unified engineering culture through 6 Director/Sr Mgr hires, clear job expectations, operating mechanisms and forums, engineering tenets, and technology simplification initiatives.- Grew engineering from 18 to 47 over 12 months.- Built a globally distributed team via scaled-up hiring as well as using a nearshore partner, with 30% of the team working globally.- Doubled gender representation.- Improved team velocity and cycle time over 20% and achieved an enviable <2.5% regression rate.- Drove technology aspects of due diligence, buy and sell side.- Simplified technology stack/sprawl, reducing from 4 cloud hosting providers to 2 ($300k/yr efficiency gain), eliminating nearly 300 unused repos, and driving an architecture practice and platform roadmap.

Series A B2B/B2C startup building email & calendaring tools for individuals and company functions that do significant outbound communication (sales, CS, recruiting). During my time we:- Increased the average experience of the eng team by over a level, more appropriate for an earlier stage startup handling mission critical, high volume workflows.- Funded, hired, and guided Mixmax's 1st ever data team.- Implemented security controls, including the achievement of SOC2 Type 2 compliance, enabling acquisition & retention of larger customers.- Implemented a scalable org structure, product development processes, and a quality strategy leading to consistently high execution while reducing overall bug volumes.- Built a globally distributed team, spanning the US, LATAM, and EMEA.- Developed a business & product strategy, significantly upgraded the product function, bootstrapped a growth team, and hired a VP Product.- Navigated the pandemic and related recession by rightsizing headcount and opex, leading to stable burn without handicapping growth. We had positive YoY growth near the end of the year.

Series B B2B/B2C startup focused on technology for physical offices. The flagship visitor registration product is seen in lobbies across the world. Brought in to grow the engineering team and culture. I also ran Product and HR temporarily and brought in a recruiting team.- Grew engineering from 18 to 52, distributed globally. - Rebuilt the mobile team, strengthened data team, and formed a production engineering team.- Kept regrettable attrition to 8% and increased diversity of the team from 5 to 15%.- Built a collaborative, learning, get-things-done, accountable culture via clear job expectations, hiring practice improvements, engineering principles, stronger tech leads, leadership coaching, KPIs/OKRs, and time investments in pairing, hacking, and spiking.- Improved milestone hit rate from n/a (no milestones) to 80%+.- Upgraded the product development process, put strong people into positions of leadership, shelved low value tech projects in favor of higher value ones, and implemented visible accountability.- Moved from a monolith to microservices, and from Heroku to AWS, Lambda, Docker, and ECS.- Improved focus on flagship product while investing in new ones, culminating in the incubation and launch of 2 products over 12 months. - As our flagship product is in the security space, achieved compliance with security and privacy standards (SOC2, GDPR) and established programs to improve our security and system availability (99.9%+).

Series E consumer startup focused on audio streaming. Served over 70MM monthly active customers across mobile, web, and consumer electronics devices like the Amazon Echo. I was brought in to transform the engineering team into a world class one.- Established a technology direction that scaled and attracted talent. Evolved monolith and built microservices in Golang, went live with a new web stack built using React.js & Node.js, and improved infrastructure with AWS, AWS serverless (Lambdas), Docker, Kubernetes, & Chef.- Transformed quality efforts from reactive to proactive. Set metrics and objectives, implemented 100% code reviews, established unit testing and brought code coverage up from zero to 30-40%, automated functional UI tests, invested time in bug bashing, and added logging, dashboards, & alerts to detect 3rd party anomalies. Brought open bug count down by 30% and bad bugs down to zero.- Grew the team by 55% from 45 to 75 motivated engineers and managers:• Strengthened hiring bar and processes -> 28 hires w/ greater avg experience• Implemented job bands and a performance management process leading to promotions, unregrettable losses, and a 48% improvement in “I have a clear understanding of my growth and promotion path at TuneIn.”• Put strongest people in positions of impact through org changes & formed new teams (Streaming, DevOps) critical to TuneIn’s success• Migrated to best-in-class internal tools (Github, CI/CD using Teamcity, and Jira)• Established principles, metrics, tech strategies, and cultural investments leading to stronger sense of purpose and identity.

Series C consumer startup acquired by SAP Concur in Oct 2016. Focus was on improving how people plan travel. We made it dead simple, intuitive, and fun! I led engineering and operations and even customer service.- Delivered software on par velocity-, quality-, and complexity-wise with competitors that were significantly larger. Achieved 70% code coverage and enabled engineers to safely canary-style deploy as often as 20x/day. Established processes that taught best practices and amplified, not ate into, productivity.- Built operational capabilities from the ground up to world class. Formed devops team. Went from 96% systems uptime to 99.9% availability of systems and all key features. Established failover, monitoring and alerting at the business metric level, and eliminated pager fatigue.- Tackled gnarly software problems. High-volume search, data pipelines, NLP, relevance, performance, high scale, leading-edge UIs across web, mobile web, iOS, and Android. Adopted current technologies (React.js, Swift, Docker, other open source) as well as built our own when relevant.- Incubated and launched a brand new product - Hello Hipmunk, an AI-powered chatbot.- Grew engineering from 12 to 44 engineers, data scientists, and managers. Built an industry-recognized team with great execution and a strong culture.

Publicly traded company building solutions for SMBs to grow their businesses. Grew and led a San Francisco engineering center.- Built a startup culture, led move into a new office space, expanded San Francisco location to 20 in 10 months.- Led a team of 30 engineers and managers covering social media marketing apps and services (San Francisco), public API platform and developer experience (Waltham, MA), mobile apps (San Francisco, Waltham, US home offices)- Drove operational and cultural changes around continuous integration/continuous delivery, release engineering, distributed architecture & teams.- Evolved hiring practices & processes and led key architect and management hires across company.- Drove culture change in engineering. Upgraded code standards, devops behaviors, cultural norms, quality practices, engineering performance management, hiring, and office space.

B2B-focused ecommerce software company, providing white label platform for enterprises (internal use, loyalty programs). Hired to build out a relevance engine and became leader of the platform organization.- Grew from 28 -> 60 managers, engineers, and QA engineers.- Drove personalization, semantics, search, data feeds, payment and billing solutions, authentication, identity management, workflow, messaging/event systems, configuration management, configuration UI, and site infrastructure for a Java (J2EE), SOA-based SaaS platform.- Implemented processes and tools to enable growth and scale, including agile/scrum, performance/scalability/project health dashboards, resource allocation decision tools, performance management.- Changed org to focus on lowering MTTR and improving system performance and availability.- Led expansion into India including formation of 1st offshore engineering team.- Drove and contributed to M&A, including due diligence and integration of 2 acquisitions.- Drove increased performance of organization measured by project output, quality, talent improvement, and SLAs. - Improved release quality, software architecture, code componentization, test environment stability, and performance and availability.

Led product development and technical operations for 1M+ customer / $400M+ Employee Management Services business targeting SMBs. Launched 15 products & features for payroll, direct debit, tax filing and payments, and employee benefits leading to $300MM+ revenue.- Directed organization of 130 managers, engineers, and partners located across US & India.- Acquired, grew, and motivated talented people … received world class performance management & job mobility scores, eliminated undesirable attrition (1 person over 3 years), built a track record of exporting talent from my organizations to strategic positions within Intuit- Drove the turnaround of our India development organization. In 1 year, turned a 7-person underperforming team into a 21-person high-performing team handling a core part of the business.- Led a 3 year decrease in defect rate with the same volume of product changes while reducing overall investment in core product.- Led technical operations improvements in shopping/entitlements platform over 6 months leading to a 3% increase (96->99%) in availability.- Drove adoption of open source, led offshore development strategy, evolved development processes (brought in Scrum), led change to increase investment in technical operations, and founded innovation program focused on creating new products/finding new sources of growth.- Built and leveraged technology partnerships with 3rd parties, drove co-development arrangements with other Intuit business units including joint efforts between the QuickBooks & TurboTax groups, and built close internal partnerships with product management, marketing, sales, and service delivery and support.