Invest, Consult, Make It Happen. Chicago based investment firm building a portfolio of for-profit environmentally friendly and sustainable businesses.We invest our intellect, experience and financial resources into ventures that support Planet-A. We invest in start-ups making social, environmental and educational impact.

Omnidesta Consulting unlocks the digital value of small and medium-sized business (SMB). With their industry know-how, Omnidesta is transforming digital transformation for SMB.

Aisle10 Commerce is an eCommerce start-up focused on building an environmentally sustainable and ethically sourced product for the MRO industry.

VentureE is on a mission to conserve the land for future generations through technology enablement.

Searchspring helps over 1,500 retailers across 10+ retail verticals create engaging shopping experiences for their customers. Our new Relevancy Platform provides retailers with the tools to make their marketing/merchandising teams more effective, deliver a contextually relevant customer shopping experience across all devices, and empowers employees across all departments with actionable insights.

Led changes in data management and small business lending divisions through analytics centric architecture and organization transformation.• Developed and kicked off a multi-year technology transition and organization transformation plan to bring multiple small business lending units under one unified technology platform and a consolidated Enova brand.• Increased software engineering and technical operation efficiencies by integrating DevOps into software engineering. Fostered SRE mindset by coaching teams to develop service level indicators (SLI) and service level objectives (SLO) for all internally developed services.• Improved overall system fault tolerance and resilience by mentoring and coaching architects and software engineers to design for failure. Guided teams to refactor service orchestration from a 'wait for recovery' model to a 'fail fast' model and drastically reduced time to recovery and overall system load.

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land. - G. K. ChestertonPlaces:China - Shanghai, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Guilin, YangshuoAustralia - Melbourne, Yarra ValleyNew Zealand - North and South IslandsTaiwan - All over the placeUS - NYC, Yosemite National Park, San Francisco to Monterey

Created engineering culture to empower Optiver China to respond to changing market conditions and newly arose opportunities with agility and discipline; with the goal of establishing Optiver China as an independent operating business unit within Optiver Group.• Technology stack: C++, Python, Django, CentOS, C#• Recruited and expanded technology organization in infrastructure, application engineering and software development by 4 full time employees and 2 interns.• Coached and guided technology teams in agile practices. Established common language with stakeholders on priority, capacity, and velocity. Resulted in reduction in random assignments and unnecessary context switching. Before, new priorities surfaced every day; after, weekly prioritization established and maintained priority for the week on a kanban board.• Coached and mentored technology leaders in leading and managing in a highly competitive environment.• Resolved tension between development and application engineering through leadership coaching and establishing common goals toward DevOps.• Created a roadmap towards DevOps, started with training development in production deployment.• Partnered with head of trading and general manager in developing business plan and making course adjustment when necessary.• Interfaced with futures exchanges and brokers in local market in on going deployment, operation and support of electronic trading platform.• Guided the technology team to respond to rapid changing financial and regulatory environment and market opportunities.

Architected the application framework, infrastructure layout and organization structure to support the company growth from 750 k to 2 million daily revenue. Brought agile not only to the engineering organization but also to ecommerce business units. Collaborated with business partners to select and implement technology for propelling the growth of the company.• Technology stack: Python, Django, R, Redis, memcached, RabbitMQ, MySQL, Redshift, and BigQuery.• Leading and managing the development of key strategic products and features such as Search, SEO and UX enhancements to ZORO.COM• Developing a product road map and leading the company to achieve specific milestones every year• Establishing an enterprise systems architecture and necessary processes to support the needs of a growing organization

Created product and technology strategies and developed ThinkCERCA platform that incorporates personalized close reading instruction, argumentation tools, and authentic writing assessments. Implemented lean product development and agile software development practices across the company. Established first in class engineering team in full stack development and IT operation. Achieved one million dollars revenue in 18 months• Technology stack: Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, Ember.js, Heroku• In collaboration with educators, designed and developed the MVP, a self-service platform for teaching reading and writing through the CERCA framework.• Managed an external front-end design and develop team while recruiting and building an in-house engineering team.• Utilized Heroku as deployment environment to reach market 3 months earlier by eliminating system procurement and setup time and directing all efforts on application development.• Live testing with beta users in several Chicago area elementary schools. Incorporated feedback and resolved defects in daily iterations.

Developed and drove the 24 month product and technology roadmap to support 3D Visual Strategy and Places Vertical. Responsible for identifying markets, designing products, and working with various teams to deliver key products that push the edge of Location Based Services technology on mobile devices. Defined prioritized list of needs that match both customer requirements and future trends, and worked with a wide variety of internal departments to move products from the idea-level to revenue-generating elements of the portfolio.

Oversaw the analysis, design, development, programming, debugging, configuration, testing and modification of software enhancements and new products for internal and customer applications. Established operational objectives, work plans and delegates assignments to subordinates. Provided leadership for multiple projects and teams (Product, Operation, Development, Test and Release). Responsible for budgeting, administrative management, project estimation, and scheduling of projects. Provided performance management and career development for a globally distributed team of 15 engineers.

Designed and developed pakringanytime.com, a location based service that enables users to search for on-street and garage parking locations and pricing information in the Chicago area.

Manager of software engineering team for Zap2it.com TV, Movies and Celebrity web sites, and its affiliate platform that powers TV listings and Movies show times sections for over 400 affiliates. Managed development and delivery of key custom solutions including products for NBC Olympics, Disney Channel, Comcast, Philips and TiVo.

Provided consulting services in software development, server performance tuning and data center operation to clients in public and private sectors.

Managed application development and operations of leading Tribune Company web sites, ChicagoTribune.com and Metromix.com.

Lead engineer for ChicagoTribune.com server operation and Chicago Digital Communities web site development.