Bio

I'm an entrepreneur, author, and event organizer. I spend a lot of time understanding how organizations of all sizes can use data to make better decisions, and on startup acceleration. I'm also fascinated by what happens when the rubber of technology meets the road of technology. I've worked in tech most of my life as a product manager. I've been directly involved in the launch of six major conferences: O'Reilly's Strata; Techweb's Cloud Connect; Interop's Enterprise Cloud Summit; the International Startup Festival; GigaOm's Structure; and the FWD50 digital government conference. I've spoken at a variety of other conferences, including Le Web, Web2Expo, IGT, Velocity, Lean UX, Enterprise 2.0, Mesh, and eMetrics. I've written three books on technology and entrepreneurship: Lean Analytics (2013); Complete Web Monitoring (2009) and Managing Bandwidth (1999) I've also contributed to a number of sites, including GigaOm, Mashable, and O'Reilly Radar. I write often—but less than I'd like—for Tilt the Windmill, O'Reilly Radar, and Solve for Interesting. My next book, co-authored with Emily Ross, is Just Evil Enough, a subversive marketing playbook for the attention economy. In 1999, I co-founded Coradiant, an early pioneer in User Experience Management acquired by BMC in April, 2011. Coradiant grew from Networkshop, a company I founded with Eric Packman (a longtime friend and co-conspirator) in 1997. I've also worked for 3Com Corporation, Primary Access, and Eicon Technology. I graduated from Dalhousie University with a B.Com (Honours) and an advanced major in Strategic Marketing. Specialties: Product management, technology ventures, web performance and operations, high-availability applications, real user monitoring, web analytics, marketing communications, business strategy, digital government.