I am a Managing Partner at SmartGateVC, leading the firm's deep-tech, physical AI, life sciences, neurotech, and cybersecurity investments across a portfolio of 50 and growing companies.
A product executive by background, I have delivered more than $1B in hardware and software products spanning AI security and test technologies — used by over 100,000 enterprises and millions of users worldwide. Two decades as a founder and operator is what I bring to portfolio founders: building world-leading products, and driving go-to-market growth.
Most recently I led the security product portfolio for Box's Intelligent Content Cloud. Earlier, as business unit lead for Applications & Security Test at Ixia, I was instrumental in building the test and measurement business — more than doubling revenues, leading over $300M in M&A, and helping drive Ixia's $1.6B acquisition by Keysight. Before that I co-founded Azimuth Systems, a wireless test pioneer I scaled from Series A to a successful exit to Anritsu.
I am also a co-author of multiple IEEE 802.11 Wi-Fi amendments spanning quality of service, security, and fast roaming — standards now shipped in billions of devices — and an advisor at Berkeley SkyDeck.
Track record
Standards & technical record
Standards work is the least visible thing on this page and, in some ways, the most useful. Sitting in an IEEE working group for years teaches you something that no amount of product management does: how a technology becomes an industry, who actually has to agree, and how long consensus takes when the participants are competitors.
I co-authored amendments to IEEE 802.11 covering quality of service, security, and fast roaming. Those mechanisms now ship in billions of devices — every phone, every access point, every laptop that has ever handed off cleanly between two APs.
It is also the reason I am comfortable saying that a technical claim is or is not credible. That judgment is not a matter of reading the deck carefully.
How I work
A first conversation is usually thirty minutes and costs nothing. I want to hear the actual problem rather than the pitch — what decision is stuck, what you have already tried, and what you think is true that you cannot yet prove.
If there is work to do, I write a short scope: the question, the deliverable, the date. If the scope will not fit in a paragraph, it is not ready to start, and I would rather spend another call getting it right than three months solving the wrong thing.
I work in writing. Every engagement produces a document — a strategy, an assessment, a landscape, a model — because a document can be argued with, and a conversation cannot. Slides are for the board; the work itself is prose.
I say no often. Roughly half the conversations I have end with me saying this is not a fit, or that you need a full-time hire rather than an advisor. That is the most valuable thirty minutes I can give somebody who is about to spend money.
I take a small number of engagements. The work is only worth what it is worth if I am actually in it, which limits how many can run at once.
Why NextScale
A fair question, given that I have a day job investing.
Sitting on both sides for the last several years, the same pattern kept showing up. Founders with genuinely excellent science would raise on the strength of the thing that was already finished, and then spend two years learning commercial disciplines that someone could have simply told them. On the other side, families and institutions moving into deep tech would ask me privately whether a company was real — a question their own teams could not answer and that no bank was going to answer honestly.
Both are advisory problems, and neither is well served by a fund. A fund can only help the companies it invests in, and its advice is never fully independent of its position. NextScale is where I do the work without that constraint.
It is independent of SmartGateVC. Where the two touch, I say so before the engagement starts.