Bio

I am the Co-Founder and CEO of Topio Networks, an industry catalyst accelerating the formation of markets by creating communities. Topio Networks has been tracking IOT and Edge Computing since its inception, has a community of 1.2 million professionals dedicated to making the business of smart connected objects a reality, and organizes events such as Edge Computing World and Intelligent Infrastructure. In addition to IOT/Edge Computing, I specialize my practice in accelerating the emergence of anything “Edge Native” helping organizations define their positioning, promote their thought leadership, and reach out to the community for feedback. I am also a frequent speaker at industry conferences and run the weekly Topio Networks webinar. Prior to Topio, I was a General Partner of venture funds and made investments consistently as a Venture Capitalist in data technology with companies such as RIghtpoint (Acq. by e.piphany) , Adknowledge (Acq. by CMGI), Inquira (Acq, by Oracle), Vue Technology (Acq. by Sensormatic), Jaspersoft (Acq. by Tibco), Silk Technology (Acq. By Palantir), and Akili Interactive. I have been my entire life interested by innovation: while in engineering school, I helped launch my school local radio station and my home town first job fair. During my first job in the mid-1980s, I became interested in Big Data and AI. At the time, I helped develop one of the first commercial rule engines to select loans and build a report generator focused on evaluating company financial risks. Both products have been used at the time in the bank branches. As part of being an investor, I spotted SaaS as a trend in 1997 and made my first investments in the space then. Following the early 2000 meltdown, I developed a model to spot financial trends and evaluate timing of investment opportunities. This approach contributed to my firm top decile fund return in the two funds I was involved with. The landscapes that you are seeing now are directly inherited from this methodology. Specialties: Smart Cities, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Dapps, Open Source, SaaS, Low-cost business model, Edge Computing, IoT