My first real job was managing the design of reactor control systems for the USS Seawolf — a nuclear-powered submarine. I was a Navy lieutenant, trained in nuclear engineering at the Bettis Reactor Engineering School, responsible for systems where the margin for error was zero. It’s a strange place to start a business career, but it taught me something that has never left me: independent judgment, under pressure, when the stakes are real.
By the time I left the Navy for business school at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, I’d already written three business plans and filed a patent application. I’ve never really stopped.
Building Ribbit: A Company Born from Serendipity and Stubbornness
I left AT&T — where I’d led VoIP and broadband product management — to chase an idea. I’d noticed that businesses needed custom phone features that traditional telecom infrastructure made almost impossible to deliver: expensive hardware, rigid bundles, no way to trigger features programmatically. My insight was simple: if telephony could be disaggregated and delivered as a cloud service accessible through web APIs, phone features could become software. Developers could build on it. A new category of application would become possible.
That company started as IDP Communications, briefly did business as Duality, and by 2006 had become Ribbit.
The early years were not smooth. A promising first deal — building a “never miss that call” feature into the San Francisco Examiner’s classifieds — collapsed when a new Examiner executive killed it, the same week my co-founding CTO left for another opportunity. I was without customers and without a technical co-founder, with a one-year-old at home and a second child on the way.
What turned it around was a combination of a stronger technology partner and, frankly, luck that rewarded persistence. I merged forces with Ted Griggs, founder of Syndeo, a well-funded but exit-less soft-switch company whose technology became the real foundation of what we’d eventually call Ribbit. And our first funding traces back — almost unbelievably — to a pancake breakfast I almost skipped. A casual family connection to Gilman Louie, then CEO of the CIA’s venture arm In-Q-Tel, led two years later to a meeting with Gilman and his new investing partner Stewart Alsop. I went in expecting a market-research conversation about phone systems; I left with a handshake term sheet, funded before Alsop-Louie Partners had even closed their first fund.
Ribbit launched Ribbit for Salesforce.com in 2007, won an unexpected “app of the year” award at Dreamforce, and unveiled Ribbit Mobile on stage at DEMO 2008. A chance airport-bar conversation years earlier with a British Telecom technology scout turned out to matter more than I could have known: by the time BT’s own API team started running into “you’re kind of like Ribbit” from prospective customers, BT already knew who we were.
The Exit: Negotiating Under Pressure
BT’s first offer, in early 2008, was unconventional and undervalued — around $50M, structured in a way that didn’t work for our investors or our team. Our board of directors, having just closed a strong B-round, initially bristled at even considering a sale. We ran the numbers on what a limited partner would need to see as a minimum acceptable return given our recent valuation, and arrived at a “buy-it-now” threshold of $105M.
BT’s CTO flew out and, after an unusually personal negotiation, offered $100M outright — take it or leave it. We turned it down, five million dollars short of the number our board had authorized. It was, in the moment, a gut-check. A few days later, BT came back with the additional $5M. We signed May 10, 2008, and closed July 29, 2008 — with AT&T literally in our office as the “no-shop” clock ran out, worried we might be the next acquisition target for Google following its purchase of Grand Central (later Google Voice).
Ribbit sold to British Telecom for $105M — roughly 3.5x our post-money valuation just months earlier.
After Ribbit: Building, Advising, Repeating
The years since have followed a consistent pattern: build something new, advise founders navigating similar terrain, sit on boards where my operating experience is useful, and do it again.
I co-founded Conga, an early machine-learning “people recommender” platform, and LeafLit, a social e-book reading app — both instructive, if not enduring, ventures. I advised or served on the boards of companies including Alianza, SeeControl (acquired by Autodesk), Vidtel (acquired by Fidelity), TimeBridge (acquired by MerchantCircle), and The Sure Chill Company, a Gates Foundation-backed cold-chain technology company where I built the strategic plan that helped secure a “Most Innovative New Cold Chain Technology” award.
In 2013, I founded EasyNDA, teaching myself HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to build the front end myself, and recruiting a CTO — a former Ribbit engineering VP — to build the back end.
From September 2015 to October 2022, I served as SVP of Sales and Marketing at Falkonry, an industrial AI company applying machine learning to anomaly detection and predictive maintenance in manufacturing. I joined as the company’s third employee and only customer-facing executive, and helped grow the business through 285% average year-over-year sales growth, with more than half of bookings eventually coming from customer-success-led renewals and expansions. I stayed on part-time as a Sales Specialist through June 2023.
From November 2022 to April 2026, I served as CEO of Patero, a post-quantum cryptography company protecting critical infrastructure and federal/DoD networks against “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks — the practice of intercepting encrypted data today to decrypt it once quantum computers make current encryption obsolete. I spoke publicly on PQC strategy, including as a panelist at the 2025 KPMG Tech and Innovation Symposium, and led partnerships addressing the U.S. government’s mandated timelines for quantum-resistant infrastructure.
Today
I currently serve as President of Crick Co., providing independent C-level advisory to boards, investors, and early-stage companies facing high-stakes decisions — helping identify what matters, what doesn’t, and what to do next. I’m also a Limited Partner at MVP Ventures, where I work directly with portfolio company founders as an operating resource, not just a source of capital. And I’ve stayed close to Patero: after stepping down as CEO in April 2026, I continue to work with the company as a freelance Commercial Agent, driving client relationships and sales for its quantum-safe encryption solutions.