What is all this?
I created this for prospective clients, employers, investors, and colleagues to better understand my professional capabilities. I have a rather nontraditional background, combining multiple skill sets which aren’t typically bundled together, and I find many people and organizations use “common sense” heuristics to find talent that often overlook the diverse skill combinations of someone like myself. While I do have a perspective on this (post pending…), this post is not intended as a missive on “how hiring is broken” or “the virtue of the generalist” or “you’re hiring wrong.” Instead, I offer my perspective on how my career and skills evolved as they did, and to suggest that perhaps even if I’m “overqualified,” “underqualified,” or, more commonly “simultaneously overqualified and underqualified,” we might mutually benefit from a conversation on how I might help you achieve your goals.
My career so far…
I’ve always had a broad set of interests coupled with a love of learning. I graduated from Macalester College (a nationally ranked liberal arts college by US News & World Report) with a double major in computer science and political science. During school I worked summers as a software developer, coding mainly in C, supporting other developers and their tools.
After graduation I joined Andersen Consulting (now Accenture), where I worked with multiple customers, including Sprint (then Sprint PCS) and AT&T (then Pacific Bell). For personal reasons I left Minnesota for San Francisco, where I joined a startup that did consulting for other startups. We lasted nearly a year, then I joined Micromuse, a network and business management and operations company. Micromuse was my first Product Management job, and my primary role was to grow and maintain the product, development, and marketing relationships with Cisco, whom OEM’d Micromuse Netcool as Cisco Information Manager. While my tenure was somewhat chaotic (10 separate bosses in 6 years), I was lucky enough to be involved in multiple aspects of the business, including sales, sales operations, legal negotiations and agreements, marketing, competitive analysis, SEC filings, pricing restructures, alliances, and of course product management and development. During this time I saw Micromuse go from startup to highly profitable public company to trading below cash value, and finally purchased by IBM for over $1.3 billion in today’s dollars ($865 M in 2005).
I joined Juniper Networks in 2006 to become the Junos SDK Product Manager. This was before the advent of Cloud, XaaS, and virtualization, and Juniper was the first networking company to invite others to build custom software to run on network devices. In addition to all the regular product management tasks, I also built and maintained the developer program, the partner program, and several inbound OEM alliances and partnerships. I was very lucky in that Juniper leadership had the foresight to structure the SDK program as a skunkworks / intrapreneurial program, and I was granted a great deal of discretion in how to run the business. The Junos SDK was phonemically successful, being a critical component to multiple deals worth well over $500 million. With the rise of Cloud, XaaS, and virtualization over the next 5 years, the Junos SDK value proposition became less valuable, and I left Juniper during the industry downturn in 2012
Soon after Juniper I joined “Advanced Storage”, a new group within Seagate focused on finding and implementing new business models for growing revenue in the next 5-10 years. I worked on business cases and go-to-market plans for several models, and worked with Seagate’s largest customers on how to scale them. Seagate was entirely focused on rotating media (hard disk drives) at the time, and we looked at business models including enhanced encryption, selling variable size drives, object-store appliances in an hdd form factor, subscription models, and more. An abrupt executive leadership change led to the group’s disbanding, and I moved on to a couple of startups. In 2015 I joined Brocade, defining business models for Brocade software products, particularly devops, workflow automation, SD-WAN, vADCs, and vCPE. Brocade was acquired by Broadcom in 2017, which sold or liquidated all non SAN businesses.
In 2018 I joined Juniper Networks for my second tour. As my previous products had been retired, I focused on software business strategy and data analysis and later data center AI/ML strategy. This is when I first started formallying studying data science and soon thereafter AI and ML. At first most of this was on my own, but as my skills became recognized I picked up more and more data projects. Many of these projects remain confidential, but I can share a) a detailed analysis of customer segmentation and product affinity, b) a recommendation on how to realign vertical marketing efforts to better serve and track enterprise customers, and detailed business cases for multiple acquisitions and partnerships, including Juniper’s purchase of Apstra in 2021. At this point I formed a team to enable Juniper & Apstra integrations to accelerate customer adoption. Integrations included Terraform, Ansible, VMware vRealize, CheckPoint firewalls, and several Juniper products. I both managed the team and was a hands-on contributor, with a special focus on analytics, visualization, normalization, and of course AI projects.
I left Juniper in April 2023 and took some time to figure out what I wanted to do next. My thinking coalesced around three things.
- Firstly, I want to build things people use. No shade to the visionaries, but I want to build things that are unequivocally useful and could start a ROI within 2-3 years. Conjuring up product ideas is pretty easy, getting them out the door and profitable for everyone is a more interesting challenge.
- Secondly, while I have been interested in AI since college, the technology is now to a point where it can be useful almost everywhere. I want to remain involved in bringing AI technology and AI-enabled products to market. With great respect to my friends in marketing, I’m particularly interested in projects with real AI technology (deep neural networks, LLMs, NLP, transformers, vision) over automation that is marketed (I’d argue, incorrectly) as AI.
- Thirdly, while the network is important, I see even more interesting things happening in AI, Cloud, security, storage, and compute, and would like to focus more on these. One of the virtues of working at a networking company is all your colleagues can help you with, say, the details of BGP, so had time to go deeper in areas we were less staffed.
The end result is I’ve my AI, cloud, security skills for this next phase of my career. In the last few months I’ve been balancing consulting work with as much education and project experience I can fit in. This has been challenging at times (I had to learn Linear Algebra) but enormously rewarding.
So that’s me in a nutshell. If you’re reading this, I’d like to get to know you. Maybe drop me an email?