1993::Reid and Priest
Intern position at the Manhattan law firm of Reid and Priest. One of the top 50 law firms this experience gave me insight into the legal working of corporate America. Exposed to the daily legal work and the fine art of wining and dining clients. Saw coalition building across legal jurisdictions and nations. Helped solve computer glitch to file papers with SEC preventing legal fines for client.
Lesson learned: Taking care of clients is a fine art. You have to balance theatrical dinner events with savvy business acumen. Watching experts do this with world class clients impressed upon me that I needed to study and learn this art.
1994::frogfire
Started web consulting firm in my second year of college.
Took role of client project manager, CTO and Lead Designer on clients such as Sony, Hewlett Packard and Acer in the early days of the internet.
As company grew managed teams of technical and creative people to achieve client goals.
Sold accounts and grew business within Motorola and TBS SuperStation.
Beat internet consulting goliaths IXL and Think New Ideas to win Equifax.com business.
Equifax.com account was involved in executive level internet strategy development spanning this multinational financial services firm.
Lesson learned: Managing people is a dynamic job and requires a unique approach: Working at frogfire I managed teams of 6-22 people. By the nature of the business these people ranged from technical to creative, business savvy to completely oblivious. The amazing challenge of managing people is to balance the individual needs that keep people motivated against the greater business goals that drive profitability. I learned how to motivate people and get them truly vested in projects… even ones that they did not want to do. I created a 50/50 system. I ask employees to spend 50% of their time with the task-based blocking and tackling of their position. This allows me to micro-manage the details of a project and guarantee that employees learn from me and each other through hands-on involvement.
I challenge them to spend the other 50% doing things outside of their tasked workload. They have parameters: I challenge them to do one of the following: a) grow your professional skillset b) go above and beyond the call of duty on a task to amaze the customer with something that they didn't expect c) do somebody else's job or d) grow the team with group events. This system has proven worthwhile in a technology setting where our business is challenged for new skillsets daily and where teamwork gets the job done. It trusts the employee to tackle dynamic business needs, but it is not for every employee. A number of employees never embraced the system and ended up spending 50% of their time doing nothing. These employees were given the opportunity to adjust and some were removed.
1996::Georgia Tech
Graduated from Georgia Tech with a B.S. in Physics, a minor in Philosophy and a minor in Computer Based Instrumentation.
I am now a card-carrying geek.
1997::qlogger.com
qlogger.com merges three powerful technologies: 1) weblogs, 2) online photo galleries and 3) data mining. It allows people to log their lives, organize events and then learn from their history. It's a personal content publishing system.
It grew out of the technology for joereger.com.
For years we've been growing technology to help us in business. Qlogger is an attempt to use that technology to help us in our lives. Find out why it's called qlogger at qlogger.com
Recently added RSS/XML capability which allows users to syndicate their own content. We all have a voice now. Use it.
1998::Ad Club Award
frogfire wins indistry award for interactive design from the Atlanta Ad Club for work on the Motorola account.
1999::BrightLane.com
Co-founder and Director of Interactive Services. Designed and built initial site on 360K budget.
Managed cross-functional teams across Oracle, BrightLane and other vendors totaling more than 50 people involved in the project.
Managed 1MM interactive marketing campaign. Involved in 7MM television, radio and print campaign. Our partner was Donino White and Partners.
Worked with PR agency Cohn & Wolfe to create events at ESPNZone, line up radio personalities and (of course) launch press releases.
Business development with partners, fund raising, analyst coverage and sales experience.
For all of the whizbang business dealings that a dot com can bring, the most fulfiling part of the job is creating an environment where people can excel and create something that they are proud of. Current interactive team includes display layer coding, account management and usability engineering skillsets working in concert with outsourced partners.
Lesson learned: You have to be willing to change your product: After a year of development costing 4MM and a national 7MM television advertising campaign it was clear that the dogs weren't eating the dog food. BrightLane had to quickly reengineer itself into an infrastructure offering. From the initial board meeting that dealt with the issue my team worked with marketing to do focus groups in a new target market, quickly built a prototype, sold it internally, worked with the sales group to verify it within the new target market and worked with development to implement the product. This nine month process was painful as the company was transformed from being a business to business site to being a business to business enabler. The demands on the company's infrastructure and process were great, but the reward of a sales pipeline filled with fortune 100 companies looking to spend upwards of a million dollars each made it worthwhile. Because of this fundamental transformation BrightLane was able to continue financing through 2001 when other dot coms dropped out of the game.
Lesson learned: Differentiate: Many companies identified the small business market at the same time that we did at BrightLane. We attempted to be first to market but were not able to beat Onvia and OneCore. Seeing this, we needed to differentiate. While other websites were merely portals, we engineered our solution around a full-blown application and favored quality of integration over quantity of deals. Doing this we invested heavily in infrastructure. This differentiation made it easier to raise funds and eventually transform the business into a back-end player. We found ourselves winning deals with national players and passing on the local deals that our competition based itself on. Clear differentiation from the competition is a key business asset and must be maintained as the landscape grows.
Lesson learned: Leadership makes it all happen: Having been through times of initial naïve bliss, confused phase one development and painful reality check it became clear that leadership carries a company through to greatness. The job of leaders is to maintain and constantly refocus the company's vision and provide a healthy and respectful working area. Most importantly, they must impart confidence and a sense of enablement. They must empower people with the confidence that they are working on a great new product. This happens over the course of time as trust builds through both brutal honesty and subtle give and take.
2000::So Poly
Taught web marketing and technology at Southern Polytechnic University.
I've always had a passion for teaching. I used a very hands-on and real-world approach to lessons. Luckily the real world is a crazy place so the class had a lot of fun and learned a lot.
2001::TeamStaff
After we successfully completed our 50/50 merger with Teamstaff, a public company with close to 1B in revenue annually, we combined the development and interactive groups into the Application Development group. I became the Director of Application Development.
Valued at 6.9million in the deal's paperwork, the First Union marketing relationship that we developed at BrightLane is critical to Teamstaff's business model. In a five month development effort our group provided the business with an enterprise referral and sales force automation system that allows hundreds of First Union business bankers to submit leads to teamstaff, track lead status and manage contacts. This project was a critical link between Teamstaff and new revenue. Written in JSP on a multi-tier Solaris platform, we successfully walked the project through business requirements, prototyping, user testing, development, quality assurance and operational launch. It was teamwork at its best.
Development team worked alongside Teamstaff partner Digital International Graphics to redevelop the corporate website with an updated theme and content.
Development of a data integrity application that spanned divisions within the company saving 500K annually.
Currently developing web front-end for a payroll application.
Currently rebuilding a recruiting site coordinating with an outside marketing agency.
2002::frogfire
Responding to the increased government and military demand for technology services and personnel we have reorganized frogfire to attack this lucrative market.
2003::Reger.com
Full time self-unemployment following the reger.com dream.
2004::Reger.com
We were fortunate to engage our first corporate customer after a year of hard work on code.
2005::Reger.com
Featureset of dataBlogging coming together well as sales interest heats up.
2006::dNeero.com
Social surveys blend market research and advertising. Another self-coded startup. Generating some excitement.
2008::dNeero.com
Continue investment in dNeero.com. With 20 million displays inside of social media from over 1 million unique urls it's clear that the concept is taking off. We land our first few corporate clients to validate the business model.
2008::pingFit.com
Fitness hobby startup. Desktop app that tells you to exercise every 20 minutes.
2011::socketware
Co-founder with one other and an investor. socketware sits at the intersection of Big Data and machine learning. As organizations have collected data for decades they've slowly found themselves overwhelmed by it. Simple tasks like moving it are cumbersome because of its sheer scale. Enter an open source Big Data ecosystem with tools like Hadoop and techniques like MapReduce. I am a Cloudera certified Hadoop Developer. But that's only a piece of the puzzle. These tools must be leveraged with a certain intelligence. This is where machine learning and artificial intelligence come into play. By running these algorithms on top of massive data sets organizations can now make their data work for them to solve their most strategic problems and create their most strategic opportunities. This is what socketware was founded to do. socketware now resides in the ATDC, Georgia Tech's startup incubation program and is privately funded.
Heading to Doc with Terp