Akamai is Personal Care, Radically Simplified. We make innovative 100% natural, multipurpose, nutrient rich personal care essentials and deliver them to your door every 2 months. We believe clean and healthy teeth, skin and hair can be achieved with a back to basics approach that is reasonably priced. Our mission is to help people break free from the mainstream norm that promotes too many products, chemicals and complexity while coming at a high cost to both our pocketbooks and overall health. To be clear, there is nothing normal about what has become “the norm”. We feel the current paradigm is broken and hope to help fix itWe also donate 1% of sales to like minded non-profits such as the Environmental Working Group.

Pono Products, Inc. was a triple bottom line company (people, profit, planet) with a mission to establish reusables as the way to address the growing plague of use-and-toss items. We acted as an evangelist, and spawned customers as evangelists.Our initial website ReusableBags.com addressed the most glaring use-and-toss problem, plastic shopping bags. Part information hub and part store, we packaged the issue and thrust it into the public eye, quickly becoming the most comprehensive and respected resource for advice, thought leadership, and high-quality reusables (from shopping bags & water bottles, to lunch bags, sandwich wrappers & much more.) We generated enormous buzz & hundreds of media mentions including New York Times, ABC News and an endorsement in An Inconvenient Truth. We popularized the idea of conscious consumption in a subtle yet powerful way, showing simple lifestyle changes could have a huge payoff. You help save the environment, save money and waste less.In Aug 2010, we rebranded as reuseit.com to better convey our broad vision and selection of products. Two years later (when we sold to Madison Brands / Plow & Hearth Catalog Group) we had grown to 300,000 customers, helping them to eliminate an estimated 1.1 billion use & toss items. We had successfully made reusables not only an accepted part of mainstream culture, but cool. Mission accomplished.I was the thought leader and architect behind the movement. I was also the voice behind our brand & identity, our lead product selector and the developer of our innovative, critically acclaimed proprietary line of products.Other achievements:• Inc 500 (#153)• Voted Green America’s Green Business of the Year, twice• Over $200,000 donated to non-profits via 1% For the Planet partnership• In 2003 developed (along with my wife) the world’s first reusable shopping bag that folds into a tiny inner pouch. Chosen as “Critic’s Choice” by Wall Street Journal, it spawned an entire new product category.

While incubating reusablebags.com, I provided consulting services helping refine and successfully launch Datalyst -- a business services company within the emerging data conversion & transcription field. I lead development of the name, brand identity, tag lines, website, and overall marketing messaging.In addition, I helped identify highly profitable niches and implemented a low-cost / high ROI lead generation system and marketing campaign delivering over 800 leads in the first 7 months, including Motorola, IBM, Mayo Clinic and University Chicago .

Foreseeing the rapid expansion of PCs, TVs and handhelds connecting to the internet, I saw an opportunity to create a new form of entertainment that I dubbed “radio for the eyes”. Leveraging the untapped well of world class art & photography, LiquidArt was the first company to broadcast image based slideshows via the internet to digital displays. I led our efforts targeting and partnering with the best art and photography brands in the world. This included renowned artists, foundations, museums, book publishers and other image based content brands. In under 2 years we cost-effectively secured 100+ high-caliber content partners. This gave us the exclusive digital rights to over 10,000 images from which we developed of 130+ slideshow programs.Using my experience in product development and software design, I architected our innovative media player (ArtPlayer ™) weaving into it a simple but effective proprietary copyright protection platform called SmartArt ™. I developed a low cost viral distribution strategy leveraging customer word of mouth, the power of the editors of web portals and the seeding of free trial collections at web portals and within our media player itself. This ignited a wildfire:• 1,000,000 downloads and 70,000 registered users in 9 months with a monthly compounded growth rate of 40%• Editors at major portals of the era including MSN.com, CNET, ZDNET, and AOL featured our collections over 120 times• Image views reaching 22 million per monthWhile closing our second round of funding, the great dot com implosion of 2000 occurred -- financing of internet related businesses disappeared virtually overnight.A few other achievements:• Developed email campaigns with average click-through rate of 20%• Raised $1M of capital from angel investors & vendor partners • Employed 13 full-time people• Development of all brand names, trademarks, and taglines including liquidart (tm), ArtPlayer (tm), SmartArt (tm), ArtCast

Seeing a niche and growing demand for quality personal computer accessories that could be marketed through specialty retail channel, I conceived and launched Manticore with a fist full of credit cards and a great idea. A pioneer in its industry, Manticore was the first to develop an upscale line of computer accessories marketed solely to the specialty retail industry. Beginning with GALLERY MousePads™, a line of high quality art-imprinted mouse pads; later expanding into screensavers, fonts based on famous artist’s handwriting, laser stationery, coasters and adhesive note pads. All “firsts to market”. Industry innovations included use of recycled rubber, introduction of die-cut shapes, glow-in-the-dark, and high-end gift package design.• Launched 7 distinct product lines, custom product development services and over 150 individual products. Developed brand names, trademarks, and taglines including Gallery MousePadstm, Adhesive Note-cubes, Wonderwerks, etc• Developed implemented very high ROI marketing & PR strategy that netted press coverage 300+ times including Rolling Stone, Playboy, Wired, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Fortune Magazine, NY and LA Times.• Over 1 million units shipped in four years; established distribution with leading retailers such as Neiman Marcus, The Museum Company, Barnes & Noble Booksellers, and nearly 2,000 specialty stores in 7 countries and secured 14 top-tier manufacturers rep groups.• Won Museum Store Association 1996 award for best new multimedia product.• Grew a highly profitable company to 14 employees using no outside capital.

I was drawn to this fast growing 6 person startup where I was responsible for customization, refinement and pilot implementations of StaffWorks, an innovative workforce management software application focused on optimizing the scheduling retail labor workforces.Providing a vital link between clients and programmers I shepherded the application from beta to full-scale rollouts. Clients consisted of large retail chains including Walgreens, Nash Finch and PetsMart. Campbell Software was purchased by SAP in 1998.

Wanting to hone my sales skills, I joined a large company with a formal sales training program. This was my first “real job”. After achieving the highest score possible in a 3 week off-site intensive sales training course based on IBM’s “solutions based” sales methodology I went on to reach 116% of my sales quota in a highly competitive market. I realized pretty quickly selling a commodity (computer networking hardware & services) was not my thing.