Headline

CEO at openspace.ai

About

I'm a technology executive, technologist and entrepreneur. My background is in artificial intelligence, drones and cameras, management and leadership, and product design. My first startup Sifteo – co-founded with David Merrill and based on our graduate work from MIT and our TED talk – was acquired by North America's largest drone company, 3D Robotics, in 2014. At 3DR, I served as VP Product, Chief Product Officer, and President. I spent time at Lux Capital, a VC firm with ~$2B under management, before starting my second company, OpenSpace. My and my teams' work has been featured in TED, The New York Times, WIRED and more; our products have been sold in boutique retail (NY's MoMA store), large format retail nationally and globally (Best Buy, Toys R Us, Amazon); I have worked on art projects shown at the MoMA, SFMoMA, Oslo Philharmonic, Paris' Villette Numerique and the Miami Museum of Art. I have run teams from 1 to >300 people, and partnered with companies such as Nickelodeon, Sony and Autodesk to launch and sell products globally at scale. I am an alumnus of MIT (graduate work at the Media Lab), Stanford (BS in Symbolic Systems), and the Screen Actors Guild (no, I'm not a good actor).

Location

San Francisco

Work experience

CEO at OpenSpace, Aug 2017 - Present · 9 yrs 2 mos, San Francisco Bay Area, OpenSpace is a Spatial AI company. Our mission in life is to make the real-world economy more predictable, more profitable and more efficient -- and to just plain simplify the lives of the pros out in the field that construct and maintain the built world -- by reinventing how work gets done with visual data at the center. After all, for real world businesses, a picture is truly worth 1,000 words. The future of real-world work will be defined by the combination of access to visual data from actual reality and AI agents that are able to operate on it (and aren't limited to just looking at documents) - that's the future we are defining! And it's going well: our customers have collected 65B+ sq ft of visual data across hundreds of thousands of sites in 120+ countries. We are a Series D company backed by investors including Lux Capital, Menlo Ventures, Alkeon, PSP and Blackrock.

Angel Investor, Advisor and Board Member at Resemble.AI, Insight Risk, Elroy Air, Tempo Automation, 3DR, Beddr, others, Jul 2015 - Present · 11 yrs 3 mos, San Francisco Bay Area, I have an advisory role at a small set of companies, and sit on the board of Elroy Air as an observer. I help out on a variety of issues, including product design, fundraising and cash management, and organizational design and culture. Basically: I try to act as a sounding board and provide advice where I can. In addition, I participate as a LP in technology VC's and do a bit of angel investing.

Entrepreneur In Residence at Lux Capital, Feb 2017 - Sep 2017 · 8 mos, San Francisco Bay Area, At Lux, I advised portfolio companies, helped source and vet deals, and pursued the ideas that became OpenSpace. It was interesting spending time on the VC side of the table.

President at 3D Robotics, Mar 2016 - Aug 2016 · 6 mos, Berkeley, CA, As President, I was responsible for internal leadership and execution at 3DR across all departments and I sat on the Board of Directors. 3DR is North America's largest drone company, with $100M raised and an international footprint across multiple markets. At 3DR, I helped build the product and engineering team that launched Solo, our award-winning prosumer and enterprise grade drone. Solo launched in 2015 and is available across the globe through specialty and large format retail locations such as Best Buy. We grew revenue from approximately $14M in 2014 to $45M in 2015 (~3X annual growth) primarily due to Solo sales. Site Scan, our SaaS-based survey, mapping and inspection software product, launched in 2016 and features cloud-level integrations with AutoDesk and ESRI, the largest players in the construction software and GIS space. We also partnered with Sony to integrate an extremely high-resolution camera into our solution.

Chief Product Officer at 3D Robotics, 2015 - Feb 2016 · 1 yr 2 mos, Berkeley CA, I am responsible for 3DR's products and product roadmap.

VP Product at 3D Robotics, Jul 2014 - Mar 2015 · 9 mos, Berkeley Ca, Led development of Solo, 3DR's flagship drone.

CEO & Co-founder at Sifteo, Aug 2009 - Jul 2014 · 5 yrs, San Francisco Bay Area, Sifteo was a venture-funded consumer electronics start-up in the gaming and play space. We raised $13M from Foundry Group, True Ventures and the National Science Foundation; designed, built and shipped two generations of mass-produced consumer electronic products into boutique and large format retailers like Barnes and Noble and Toys R Us; we built cutting edge technology in sensing, virtualization, wireless communication; shipped a library of innovative and addictive games for our system; built an API for game development and partnered with some awesome groups like Nickelodeon and designers of games like Magic: The Gathering and Bit.trip Runner - and we sold the company!

Education

MS, Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

BS, Symbolic Systems (Artificial Intelligence), Stanford University