About

After starting as a product manager in deep tech and networking at Eicon, Primary Access, and 3Com (the company that invented Ethernet), I co-founded Real User Monitoring pioneer Coradiant, raising a $20M series A in 2001 (the largest investment of its kind in Canadian history at the time.) Coradiant’s groundbreaking TrueSight traffic performance technology was acquired by BMC in 2011 for $135M.

In 2010, I co-founded the Year One Labs accelerator, an early-stage incubator that turned $350K in investment into $10M in valuations in six months and launched companies like Localmind (acquired by AirBnB.) I’ve lectured at Stanford, McGill, and Harvard (where I served for three years as a Harvard Business School visiting executive.)

I’ve been fortunate enough to be in the right place for several major tech cycles. When the web and networking were growing rapidly, I chaired tracks on web performance for Interop; as cloud computing grew, I chaired GigaOm’s Structure and launched the Enterprise Cloud Summit and Cloud Connect with UBM. As Big Data and AI became a critical conversation, I chaired O’Reilly’s Strata and other conferences on data and AI. I’ve chaired Startupfest, Canada’s original startup event, since its launch in 2011, and in 2017 I co-founded FWD50, a global conversation on digital government.

Along the way, I’ve co-authored four books on technology, marketing, and innovation. I try to spend my spare time building awesome things with interesting people, and believe humans can do amazing things when nobody cares who gets credit.