I am currently a Managing Director at WestRiver Group (WRG), a Seattle-based investment company which I joined in 2018 to help launch its new venture equity investment platform, starting with its Technology Fund which I lead. This fund is focused on investing in B2B technology companies primarily located in the Pacific Northwest - the “cloud capital of the world.” Our core thesis revolves around investing in companies that different embodiments of AI across large datasets as the foundational element of their products or services. I have been fortunate to have backed some amazing companies and currently serve on the boards of Groopit, Tagboard, Tectonic Audio Labs, Qorus Software and PTO Exchange. I also serve on the Limited Partner Advisory Committees (LPACs) of Energy Innovation Capital and TwoSigma Ventures, and am a special advisor to Madrona Venture Labs Fund III. Prior board roles include Igneous Systems, Inc. (Acquired by Rubrik, Inc.), Wicket Labs, Inc. (Acquired by Brightcove, Inc.) and CHEQ (Acquired by Cantaloupe, Inc.).

Prior to WRG, I founded Soda Media, Inc. in 2010 with the goal to provide strategic advice and operational expertise to family offices investing within the broader venture eco-system. Some of the companies that I’ve been involved with include Make.tv (acquired by LTN), ContentGuard, Pendrell Corp., Mindbloom (acquired by Welltok), Tablesafe and Quu Interactive.

Before launching Soda Media, I worked for telecom pioneer Craig O. McCaw’s Eagle River Investments where I served as President of our portfolio company Onecast, Inc., a personalized news aggregation platform. During my time at Onecast, we made the 1Cast application the world’s first cross-platform broadcast news and information service that put users in control of what, when and how they consume their video news content.

Prior to joining Eagle River, I co-founded and served as CEO of Broadstream Communications, which was the telecom industry’s first Platform-as-a-Service offering virtual head-end and middleware applications for Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) delivery.  While at Broadstream I co-authored the first Internet Protocol (IP) transport and licensing agreements with leading programmers and broadcasters such as Disney, Viacom, NBC-Universal, ESPN, Discovery Communications and others.  These efforts resulted in the IPTV industry’s largest library of linear content rights. Broadstream’s offering also represented the first widespread use of the MPEG4 encoding standard, 16QAM satellite modulation for transponder efficiency and software-based DRM. Broadstream was acquired by Avail Media (now called Vubiquity) in 2006 and was subsequently acquired by Amdocs in 2018.

The concept that became Broadstream was developed while I was General Manager of Fisher Pathways, Inc., a division of regional broadcasting company Fisher Communications, Inc. (now a part of Sinclair Broadcast Group).  Pathways gave me my first in-depth exposure to programming origination and the satellite and fiber re-distribution business. Customers included ESPN, Amazon, The Portland Trail Blazers, CNN and others. While at Pathways, I led the reorganization of the business and returned it to profitability, something I am incredibly proud of.

Earlier in my career I held a number of roles within the wireless telecom industry, which included serving as Vice President of Real Estate for Advanced Radio Telecom Corp. – a publicly traded, global fixed wireless provider - where my team and I led the acquisition of over 800 Million square feet of telecommunications facilities through various transactions and partnerships with some of the world’s largest real estate owners and operators throughout the US, UK, Scandinavia and Japan. ARTT’s broadband fixed wireless network was one of the first to trial video and voice over IP in a hybrid wireless/wireline network in partnership with Cisco Systems and GE Americom.

My background in the telecommunications industry began in the early days of PCS systems deployment, where I consulted and oversaw the network deployment and site acquisition efforts for GTE Mobilnet’s CDMA network build-out on the West Coast.  It was through these efforts that I became a co-author of Washington State’s Wireless Siting Policy directed by Washington State’s then-Governor Gary Locke.