Lexipol serves more than 3 million public safety and government professionals with a range of informational and technological solutions to meet the challenges facing these dynamic industries. But through all the changes, our mission remains the same:To use content and technology to create safer communities and empower the men, women, and organizations that serve them.

The LA CTO Forum is a vibrant, private, invite only network of 250+ CTOs that meets once a month in Santa Monica. As an Advisor, I provide direction for the organization, help screen and mentor new members, help find speakers, and provide support to other members. This is an amazing group of the top technical minds in Los Angeles and I’m proud to be part of its success. More at: www.lactoforum.org

At TruConnect, I steered the technology strategy and operations, leading pivotal initiatives that not only drove product innovation but also operational excellence. It was here that I spearheaded the transformation of the tech organization, supporting the growth from a $100M ARR to a powerhouse capable of sustaining over $300M in revenue.Achievements:• Guided strategic initiatives that scaled the company's tech systems, facilitating swift business growth and elevating ARR significantly.• Revitalized the customer product flow, enhancing both sales processes and customer experiences.• Forged a lucrative collaboration with Amazon, boosting revenue growth and reducing customer churn.• Overhauled the data services framework to a data-driven decision-making model, improving strategic agility.

I founded and lead the Startup CTO Communities Program at AWS, where I worked with CTO-based organizations around the world. I supported and engaged with external CTO monthly clubs in cities such as: LA, NY, SF, Boston, Washington DC, Lisbon, Tel Aviv, Berlin, and Melbourne to name a few. Additionally, I partnered on and helped to develop CTO-targeted conferences in major cities (and now virtual), as well as organized and moderated over 150 CTO roundtables all over the world. My work with CTOs took many shapes, including mentoring on management or technical leadership, connecting them to members of my network, providing them access to AWS resources, migrating to the cloud, and/or getting them the technical support they needed to properly manage their AWS infrastructure. During my time at AWS I mentored at over 20 Techstars programs in the US, interacted with 100s of startups, and interfaced with over 1000 CTOs worldwide.

Entrepreneur In Residence for the Techstars LA 2019 and 2020 cohorts

At JIBJAB BROS. STUDIOS we make things that make people laugh. From our flagship JibJab branded satires, ecards and messages, to our kids and family brands, StoryBots and Hello Santa, we have been using technology to innovate storytelling for over 15 years -- and we’re just getting started. • Responsible for the complete re-write of JibJab.com from scratch to replace the existing site with a more modern tech stack to ease development costs, make the site mobile friendly, and increase the overall performance of the site. The result of the rebuild was a codebase that provided more flexibility and reduced development time for features, a more performant site, and a site that was elegantly functional on mobile devices. These changes propelled the company to 25% new subscriber growth after years of stagnation, and more than doubled our mobile web conversion rate.• Oversaw the complete migration of the entire JibJab technical infrastructure from a co-lo datacenter to AWS. The migration allowed us to significantly increase our ability to handle the holiday-based traffic spikes that would frequently cause outages at critical times for the business. By migrating our infrastructure to AWS we reduced our overall costs by ~20%, achieved 99.999% uptime, and increased site speed during peak usage by over 40%.• Pitched the need for a native Android JibJab app to increase revenue streams. Oversaw the development of Android app that resulted in adding $1MM of new revenue.

Evolve Media is a publisher of leading enthusiast destinations for men and women.  Leveraging proprietary advertising and publishing technologies, Evolve Media offers premium and engaging content to its readers, while offering marketers the tools needed to execute custom, content-led marketing solutions that reach its audience of over 95 million people globally each month.•Executive Leadership: Transformed technology department to be development/product focused, while reducing inherited emphasis on technical operations. Reduced operational headcount and 20% of budget by migrating all systems from proprietary data center to a managed hosting solution within first year. •Team Management: Manage technology department currently consisting of over 70 developers, managers and technical operations personnel. Oversee developers working in multiple disciplines including Ruby, PHP, Flash, jQuery, and MySQL. Managing development teams in three locations, Los Angeles, Mexico and Serbia.•Product Development: Responsible for 3 major product lines including: 25+ websites, embeddable video player, and a distributable content recommendation engine. Implemented development methodology, utilizing agile approach with weekly releases. •Budgeting: Accountable for $10M annual technology budget. Negotiated and implemented solutions with vendors including Peak Hosting, NetApp, Dell, Qwest, and Oracle.

Working with teams of entrepreneurs to further their business and technology goals as part of the USC Viterbi Startup Garage program.

CareerArc Group was started as a human capital management company focused on the training, recruiting and transitioning of America’s workforce. We’ve accomplished this by creating and operating three different Software-as-a-Service businesses: Internships.com, TweetMyJobs, and CareerBeam. •Executive Leadership: Founding CTO of CareerArc Group, entrusted with the creation of the technology department from inception. Built and launched Internships.com, while simultaneously building development team on the fly in a 3-month period of time. Site grew to be world’s largest internship marketplace, with over 25% of all college students visiting the site in a given year. •Team Management: Constructed and managed technology department consisting of over 20 developers, designers, information architects, and operations personnel at peak. Oversaw developers working in multiple disciplines including Ruby, C#, Neo4j, jQuery, MSSQL 2010 and MySQL. Managed development teams in two locations, Burbank and Boston.•Product Development: Introduced and implemented countless product features across 3 sites.Implemented development methodology, utilizing agile approach with weekly releases. •Budgeting: Accountable for $5M annual technology budget. Negotiated and implemented solutions with vendors including Amazon, Cisco, 2SMS, Silverpop, Qwest, HP, Citrix, •Project Management: Implemented technology such as Amazon Web Services, SOLR, Facebook Connect, N2 CMS. Launched 8 native iPhone and Android applications.

Slingshot Labs was NewsCorp’s technology incubator launched for the purpose of building 4-5 high traffic sites per year. Slingshot’s emphasis is on speed to market with engaging and compelling websites that will leverage NewsCorp’s considerable distribution channels to drive traffic.•Executive Leadership: Established 5 companies in first year of operation; highlighted by www.dailyfill.com, which garnered 4M unique visitors in only its second month of existence.•Team Management: Built and managed technology department consisting of over 35 developers, designers, information architects and operations personnel. Oversaw developers working in multiple disciplines including C#, PHP, CSS, JQuery, MSSQL 2005 and MySQL.•Product Development: Implemented development methodology, utilizing agile approach with weekly releases. •Global Outsourcing & Budgeting: Negotiated and implemented hardware solutions with vendors including Hewlett-Packard, Citrix NetScalers and NetApp Storage.•Project Management: Implemented technology such as SOLR/Lucene, Akamai edge caching, Facebook Connect, MySpaceID, Ektron CMS. Also, launched iPhone application in support of DailyFill site.

Created and oversaw Internal Business Systems Department charged with building and maintaining all applications used by internal personnel. Applications included company billing software, user training applications, and software to support internal Investigations Department. Built team of four into team of 17, consisting of project manager, business analysts, and application and database developers.• Team Management: Managed 15 database developers responsible for new project delivery, system enhancements & production support for 4 major product lines. Successfully architected, developed and released more projects to production in one year than previous three combined.• Budgeting: Managed multiple development and hardware budgets, and project plans/budgets for support of internal business units.

•Leadership: Directed team of 50± people, consisting of Developers (VB.Net, ASP.Net, legacy), DBA’s (Oracle, SQL Server), Project Managers, and System Adminis (Unix, Imaging, AS400) responsible for new project delivery, system enhancements, and prod support of over 8 major systems. Teams were located in Los Angeles, New York, Phoenix, Atlanta and India.•Team Management: Merged three entirely separate IT departments, serving different business units, into one department. Comprehensive reorganization was achieved without interrupting projects in flight and production support, or losing any staff members.•Global Outsourcing: Staffed, trained and transitioned to entirely new development team located in Chennai, India due to change in outsourcing vendors. Managed dual teams throughout process to minimize impact to application development and support.

•ResponseBase/MySpace: Consolidated 30 disparate client databases into one physical database totaling over 175 million records. Designed and constructed new data model to support business functionality.•3M: Audited IT infrastructures and organization, devised complete outsourcing solution, restructured standards/methodologies, and implemented centralized Help Desk.•Six Flags Amusement Parks: Implemented corporate real-time replication strategy for Six Flags’ website, across multiple U.S. cities. Reconfigured existing security standards and backup recovery strategies.•Pritzker Reality Group: Converted existing legacy system to web-based model. Identified, modeled and created new data model to support new functionality. Converted existing data structures, including consolidation and reconciliation of production data.