Who We Are

Throughout my 20 year career, I’ve successfully built a $1B business segment for a large public company, guided the turnaround of a distressed $100M+ revenue business, launched and sold a venture-backed startup, and led the rise of one of the world’s fastest growing B2B SaaS businesses.

My first career was in hospitality, where I served as the first VP of Loyalty Marketing for Harrah’s Entertainment and led the turnaround of a failing 3,000-employee hotel and casino company. In 2007, I founded my first startup, which I successfully sold after 4 years and several rounds of capital. Starting in 2012, I served as COO of Taulia, growing the business from seed to D in less than 3 years.

Since 2014, I have led ETW Advisors, a firm of expert early stage operators who have combined their considerable skills to advise the next generation of startups to launch, grow and reach scale. I founded ETW because I believed that the biggest positive impact I could have on the world would be to positively influence the next generation of startup entrepreneurs. I’ve dedicated my professional life to that end.

Ever since I joined my first startup in 1996, I’ve enjoyed working with small, driven teams, helping to transform cutting edge technologies into real businesses. My first two startups revolutionized fiber-optic telecommunications, resulting in two acquisitions among the top 10 largest VC-backed M&A deals of all time. After the .com crash, I shifted my sights to consumer internet and started one of the world’s first social networks, hi5.com, which grew to 60M MAU. Later in my career I followed the explosion of smart phones to found an app discover site that organically attracted 15M installs.

Beyond my life as an operator, I was an active investor and mentor including serving as President of Sand Hill Angels in Palo Alto, CA. I’ve long recognized that good advice and mentorship are both more rare and precious than capital. That led me in 2017 to join ETW as a Managing Director and Partner.

I’ve had a few careers in various industries, but independent of my functional roles, the most important skill I’ve mastered is the ability to ask good questions.

I’ve developed that skill over a 20 year career that has spanned banking, entrepreneurship, personal coaching and startup advising. I’ve helped start 6 businesses, including co-founding a software company that we built from start-up to a profitable multi-million-dollar global operation to a successful M&A exit.

I have my CPA license, multiple academic degrees and a professional coaching certification but above all else my greatest passions are mentoring my fellow entrepreneurs and volunteering at my kids’ schools.

I love the early stage journey, particularly uncovering the magical intersection between what the market wants and how to sell it. There are so many open questions, different stakeholders, shifting variables – it’s like a game of chess where the right moves lead to rising revenues and happy customers.

I’ve had the good fortune of wearing many hats in my startup life from business development, to product management to sales. For the last 10+ years, I’ve built and led go-to-market teams for 3 organizations, one of which went public (Jive, valued at $1B+) and the other two still going strong. Building startups has fed my ambitions for years, and I joined ETW Advisors so that I could impact not just one startup, but rather a portfolio of them across the globe.

My early career spanned nearly 15 years across Microsoft and O’Reilly Media before immersing myself in the startup ecosystem with successful stops at Khosla Ventures, 500 Startups, and as a cofounder of a Bay Area hardware accelerator Highway1. I was fortunate to help fund more than 75 startups (including notables such as Cue Health, Modbot, and Molekule). Along the way I co-authored a book O’Reilly’s The Hardware Startup and co-founded Ignite, an international talk series that has been held thousands of times across the stages of SXSW, Google, The Gates Foundation to the White House.

My career as a startup founder and product leader began after earning my PhD in Game Theory and Behavioral Economics from Caltech. In 2008, I founded my first startup, Crowdcast, and successfully exited the company in 2012. Following Crowdcast, I helped lead three more startups: Spigit (SVP Product), tenXer (Head of Product), and Swerve (Founder, CEO).

After my four startup experiences, I ventured into the enterprise world and joined Salesforce (VP Product), where I helped ship the company’s first AI product. But it was through my involvement in Salesforce’s M&A process that I ultimately realized I wanted to return to startup life.

Each chapter of my career was chosen based off of where I’d find my next challenge. I’m a problem solver at heart, and I take pride in repackaging all that I’ve learned throughout my career in order to effectively mentor the next wave of passionate founders.

I love complex problems – the more variables, the more moving parts, the more complexity the better. I’ve spent the vast majority of my career in administrative and operations roles supporting executives and teams across both large companies and small.and from consumer internet to healthcare. I joined ETW Advisors in 2016 because of the challenge. How best do you build an infrastructure to support a global portfolio of startups? We host events, curate content, build proprietary teaching materials and connect a team of advisors with a network of founders. There are endless details to consider and I’m fortunate enough to sit at the center of the machine.

Woof.