I’ve been working in technology related businesses since the dawn of the commercial Internet. In 1995, I started with Jason and Matthew Olim, building music CD sales company, CDNOW. We grew like a rocketship from their basement to a 500 person, $100M revenue publicly traded company in less than 5 years. As the business development lead my team developed first-of-their-kind partnerships with AOL, Yahoo!, Rolling Stone, The Grammy’s (NARAS), CBS, Sony, MTV, ESPN to name a few. I also built our ad sales function that landed multi-million dollar anchor sponsor agreements with Visa USA and Mastercard.

I left CDNOW, as it was acquired by BMG in 2001, to work with early stage, high growth businesses. Along the way I’ve been a founder, executive, consultant, mentor and investor.

Some of the highlights (and low lights) include:

• ShopRunner – Hired as initial VP of Business Development pre-launch to sign up large anchor retailers into a free two day shipping consortium. In 10 months my team signed up 42 retailers prior to launch. ShopRunner was recently acquired by FedEx from Michael Rubin’s (GSI Commerce, Fanatics) Kynetic umbrella.
• GuyHaus/Backstory – Co-founder with Jesse Middleton (Flybridge) and Mike Oliver (Alma) of service that pivoted to help SMBs cater their web sites to individual visitors. Raised money from NY Angels including Adam Neumann (WeWork). Flamed out after differences in direction among founders.
• Phenom – I served as a consultant and advisor to the founders in the early stages of their development, as they were raising their first venture money.  Phenom is now one of the worldwide leaders in the Talent Experience Management space providing platforms for the largest companies in the world.  Still private, Phenom has raised $61 million to date.
• ActionX – Hired by mobile ad tech startup as SVP BD and Sales to engage anchor clients and build out sales team. Investors included Softbank and Lerer (now Lerer Hippeau). Attracted clients worldwide, including Hearst, Saks 5th Ave, WWE, 1800 Flowers, Forbes, OpenTable, Hotels.com, Zalora, Lazada, Dafiti. Sold business to Xaxis, a unit of the largest ad group in the world, WPP’s GroupM in 2015.

I left Xaxis/GroupM in 2018 to again continue my work with early stage, high growth businesses.

Random Facts:

• I was a founder and initial board member of the first trade association of “eRetailers”, Shop.org
• I spoke at the first internet conference in South Africa in 1996
• I have an Emmy Award for my work as a producer on a regional TV series
• I’m a leukemia survivor
• I won a poker tournament at the former Taj Mahal in Atlantic City
• I played craps with Michael Jordan in Vegas
• I’ve been married for 23 years to my amazing wife, Adena
• I have the best daughter in the world (maybe I’m biased), Lucy
• I own a freeze dried candy company, Broad Street Farms Freeze Dried Candy