About Me

I am a once and future entrepreneur who is obsessed with news, politics, and soccer. I caught the travel bug when I was 13 and went to Europe with my father for the first time. This was probably the genesis of my interest in food and culture as well.

I studied International Economics at The Johns Hopkins University and got my Masters from its Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC. Observing the differences between cultures and systems taught me to consider the perspective of your audience/target/market. Whether for diplomacy or product positioning, "knowing your client" was the key to achieving any aim, political or commercial.

Two years at Merrill Lynch reinforced the mechanics and the numbers game of selling. Three years of Lead Gen and MarCom at a small financial software company - BancWare - taught me product positioning and the way to create materials to support your processes.

I started a company, XMD, in the mid 90s to create an online trading platform for goods and services.

We were early...way too early.

To put this into perspective, eBAY - founded on the same idea - was founded a couple years after us and they took quite awhile to catch on as well.
We did alot of things right - we created some great products, we built a customer base of hundreds of clients, and created some buzz in the industries we were targeting...

We did some other things wrong - without a laser focus on revenue growth you will run out of time to succeed...and we did.

At Nobilis, I took a supporting role and helped build out a fantastic Marketing team over four years that created a ton of Buzz and beat out numerous companies 100x our size to win 2 major national technology awards. Once again, the story was a great idea that was well executed on many levels, but not on all of them, and we ran out of runway.

And now on to Transparent, where I have been charged with creating an online business to transition a successful retail business to the brave new world. It's early, but there's alot of potential.

All the way along, I have had the best family anyone could hope for. I lucked out by meeting the perfect person for me in High School. Julie and I have been together for over 20 years and our 3 boys are cool and tolerate our sharing their lives for now.

We live in Wayland, a small town about 30 minutes from Boston, and spend most of our free time driving our children to soccer practices and games. It can be burdensome now, and we will miss it all too soon...

We try to get to Europe every year or two and it is interesting to see how our children have been bitten by the travel bug...just like I was...maybe this will start the whole cycle of their lives in a similar way to mine.