Bringing the power of Generative AI to business through AI Agents, RAG, and LLM customization.

GLG is an expert network that connects clients with advice from a network of millions of registered experts. I report to GLG’s CTO and built our AI/ML organization, and I lead efforts to automate client/expert matching using advanced deep learning models and AI techniques. During my tenure we have introduced cutting edge deep learning NLP, collaborative filtering, and NLP Named Entity Recognition, and our stack includes React and solr.New processes and software I developed in my first year increased AI-sourced revenue from $20MM annually to $80MM annually.

WhatsMyWine was a mobile app startup that provided personalized retail wine shopping recommendations based on user’s rating history and local retail availability (“Yelp for wine”). I developed the product concept and partnered with a cofounder, and my focus was on product management, product marketing, and technical leadership. I wrote our POC app and a Ruby on Rails backend with recommendation algorithms, enterprise analytics, and a management portal. I also built an engineering team, introduced Agile processes, and led delivery of a production version of the consumer-facing mobile app and improvements to the UI to prepare for public release. I also wrote an inventory data acquisition mobile app for internal use and ran DevOps, which included a containerized (Docker) autoscaling deployment on AWS (>99.9% uptime).

I provide strategic technology leadership, invention, review and software development consulting services to clients who need transformative results quickly.In this practice, I've helped companies to restructure/rebuild their engineering organizations, recruiting and training elite engineering teams.I've also stepped in and quickly rescued software products with performance and/or scalability issues with architectural changes and point enhancements that result in 10x or 100x improvements.At the strategic level, I provide systems architecture reviews and engineering organization evaluations for investors or companies considering an acquisition.

Decision Grid was a SaaS product powered by AI and graph visualization techniques used for investigations (“Palantir light”). I was recruited by DecisionGrid’s CEO to help turnaround the development function and take a POC to market readiness. My work included rebuilding the tech team and implementing a disciplined TDD - Scrum - Agile approach, which significantly improved our velocity to deliver an Ember.js and Ruby on Rails product. I also led efforts to modify the product architecture for data storage and introduced analysis algorithms with increased scalability, leading to product performance improving 10x in the first 14 days and 2x more in the first month. DecisionGrid shut down due to funding difficulties related to long sales cycles in military and law enforcement markets.

Quantera Systems is a securities trading firm using quantitative models for high-frequency trading. I was a technical co-founder with an investor and guided engineering for our HFT solutions, with oversight for technical decision making, strategy, and execution.Projects included building ML-powered trading models (i.e. Neural Networks, Support Vector Machines, K-means), implementing a multi-terabyte data warehouse of financial market data used to train predictive models, and development of sophisticated market data cleansing/correction techniques to ensure accurate backtesting simulation. Our environment featured on-demand infrastructure scaling via private cloud and Amazon AWS instances.

Barfly was a media network providing in-bar TV experience augmentation with interactive entertainment, advertising, and messaging. I was an early hire and tasked with growing the engineering team and redesigning and rebuilding an immature platform to enable scaling from a few local clients to hundreds or thousands of clients nationwide. I built the team and led efforts to rebuild the legacy product into a high-availability platform to production in <6 months. The platform’s success was a critical factor in Barfly’s acquisition by TouchTunes.

Mixzing was a startup that created music recommendation and AI playlist building software. I bootstrapped Mixzing with a co-founder and managed most engineering and product management functions. We built a best-of-breed music recommendation engine that created custom playlists and new music recommendations, and it became the recommendation engine for Social Muse and the Mixzing Android music player.

Deja was founded prior to the advent of Internet search engines to provide users with access to the vast knowledge contained in Usenet discussion forums, including older data typically unavailable due to the costs of data retention. The company was acquired by Google in 2001 and became Google Groups. At Deja we raised seed funding and a $2M Series A round, eventually raising $70M total and growing to ~130 employees and $7M ARR. We created the first distributed, sharded text database capable of handling large text and data volumes based on hardware/software limitations of the time, making Usenet’s full content searchable for the first time. The product was delivered in months and continuously enhanced to meet high uptime and performance targets as it grew from zero to millions of unique monthly users. Since there were no capable ad delivery networks at the time, we had to build our own ad delivery software which we called GlobalTrack. I did all of the product management and systems architecture for that and led its development. It was extremely high performance and high capacity and had some of the most advanced ad targeting available at the time, unmatched until Google released AdSense years later.I hired a CEO to handle non-technical aspects of the business, and my focus was on building an 80-member engineering organization and mentoring our team. Some of our alumni have gone on to become industry leaders (CTO at PayPal, VPs at eBay, Roku, QuantLab, and the president of the Wikimedia foundation). While at Deja I earned Austin Information Technologist of the Year, the Dvorak Award for Best Use of Web Technology, and PC Magazine Editor’s Choice.

Deja News (eventually became Deja.com) was founded prior to the advent of Internet search engines to provide users with access to the vast knowledge contained in Usenet discussion forums, including older data typically unavailable due to the costs of data retention. The company was acquired by Google in 2001 and became Google Groups. At Deja we raised seed funding and a $2M Series A round, eventually raising $70M total and growing to ~130 employees and $7M ARR. We created the first distributed, sharded text database capable of handling large text and data volumes based on hardware/software limitations of the time, making Usenet’s full content searchable for the first time. The product was delivered in months and continuously enhanced to meet high uptime and performance targets as it grew from zero to millions of unique monthly users. I hired a CEO to handle non-technical aspects of the business, and my focus was on building an 80-member engineering organization and mentoring our team. Some of our alumni have gone on to become industry leaders (CTO at PayPal, VPs at eBay, Roku, QuantLab, and the president of the Wikimedia foundation). While at Deja I earned Austin Information Technologist of the Year, the Dvorak Award for Best Use of Web Technology, and PC Magazine Editor’s Choice.This entry may look redundant and it is but LinkedIn will lose track of my association with folks who used this name in their LinkedIn Experience if I delete this entry so I'm keeping it. Also, more skills to highlight.