About

I really enjoy life. More specifically, I really enjoy my life: family (including my beautiful girlfriend), friends, creating, live music, international travel, college football, the outdoors, drinkies and the Internet. In that order.

I’m originally from a tiny ranching town in the Humboldt County redwoods of far northern California called Ferndale. I’ve since been back and forth between coasts, but will always be a California kid at heart.

I currently live in NYC and lead strategy and development at OpenSky, a company I started with John Caplan, the former CEO of Ford Models and President of the About.com Network.  We’ve set out to create a movement that is re-imagining retail by building a community of people that, working together, is changing how the world shops. As the late, great Patrick Swayze once said, ”Look at it, Johnny. Look at it! This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, man.”

Previously, I ran strategy and development at Gilt Groupe, a leading online fashion and travel retailer that curates a broad range of daily sales to serve to its exclusive, invitation-only membership.  I joined just after launch as an early employee leading strategic planning, capital raising and expansion into Men’s, Children, Home, Travel and International. It was a rocket ship ride that I’ll never forget.

Before Gilt, I was a VP at MaxPreps.com, serving in various roles including product management, business development and strategy. There, I was responsible for driving product and business strategy as well as establishing and developing business and technology partnerships that enabled and accelerated the production, distribution, and consumption of our content and services. Additionally, I was a core member of the team that negotiated MaxPreps’ successful sale to CBS Corporation in 2007.  You can’t work for a better man or with a better team than I did at MaxPreps…simply an amazing group of people.

Previously, I was an investor at DEP, a venture capital firm that partners with leading entrepreneurs to build market-transforming companies. While there, I led investments in Enpocket (acquired by Nokia), Gomez (acquired by Compuware), MaxPreps (acquired by CBS), Netmotion, Overtone, Sportvision, TouchCommerce, and Vitalstream (acquired by Internap).

Before venture investing, I was a technology and media investment banker at Morgan Stanley where I advised world-class management teams on strategic, financial and operational issues, and worked on several of the highest profile technology transactions in history, including Google’s $1.7bn IPO, VMware’s $635mm sale to EMC, Legato’s $1.7bn sale to EMC, and Cisco’s $500mm acquisition of Linksys.

Early in my career, I worked as a systems engineer at Sun Microsystems (subsequently acquired by Oracle for over $7bn).

I received my B.S. in Business Administration from the University of California, Berkeley in 2002. While at Cal, I played for the nation’s top ranked varsity rugby team where I helped earn the school four national championships.