BACKGROUND AND WORK HISTORY

Chris began his professional career by starting his first company (Turbotrax) as a senior in high school. He received a patent on a product and sold tens of thousands of products worldwide before he graduated from college (click here to read his entrepreneur page about his lacrosse company). His father was an engineering professor at the Moore school at the University of Pennsylvania and Chris decided that he wanted to work in technology but knew from his Turbotrax experience that he wanted to do more than just engineer products.

When he graduated with his BSEE, he was chosen for ADC Telecom’s prestigious FLDP (Future Leadership Development Program). He was one of three selected in 1998 and mentored by Bill Cadogan (ADC’s CEO) to gain executive leadership skills in the telecom industry. Chris’s first rotation was at the company headquarters in Minneapolis in the engineering group working on HDSL products. For his second rotation, he moved to Spain (since he speaks fluent Spanish) and was leading the deployment of the Hybrid Fiber Coax deployments throughout Europe. For his final rotation, he moved to Silicon Valley and worked as product manager for the network management system (NMS) of the cutting edge packet shaping product called ServicePoint. Through these rotations, he now had experience in engineering, customer service, business development, product management and marketing. He began looking at opportunities internal to ADC, but also was intrigued with the startup environment in Silicon Valley.

In 2000, he decided to join Calient Networks. Calient was the global leader in pure photonic Optical Circuit Switching with systems in next generation data centers. Calient’s 3D MEMS switches allowed data center operators to dramatically reduce costs by eliminating the optical to electrical to optical conversion in the switches by staying optical throughout the port switching process. Chris was hired to run the NMS which managed the DiamondWave hardware deployments. GMPLS was developed since there was no protocol capable of handling wavelength switched networks.

After leading the release of the first and second release of DiamondWave Manager, the optical market took a downturn and Chris headed to San Diego to team up with an ADC executive (John Giffin) that he knew from his FLDP days. John was CEO of LightPointe and asked Chris to come and run product management for their Free Space Optics product line. These innovative products used a multi-beam configuration to average out attenuation using multiple paths which gave the products the ability to transmit longer distances. Chris’s product management experience had taught him that product managers are CEO’s of each product. LightPointe was a small company and Chris got to hone his experience working with sales and the customer to define what functionality was needed. He then worked with the engineering team to prioritize these requirements. He worked with business development to expand beyond the wireline carriers into wireless carriers for BTS backhaul and into military and government customers. He developed partnerships with ADC to integrate the FSO products into the antenna extension products that ADC offered for base station hoteling and used his Spanish to deploy these products in Nextel networks in Latin America. Chris also picked up the customer service team and had 10 field engineers reporting to him located in the US, Dubai, UK, Singapore, India, China, and Germany. There are some inherent problems with Free Space Optics which is the massive attenuation when fog is present. At one point, he looked at using 10 micron technology, but due to the heterogeneous nature of fog, all frequencies are affected when fog is present.

Chris was recruited to Ethertronics which was pioneering the internal antenna space to manage product management and business development. During this phase of the company, Chris was able to use his technical background and created a competitive analysis of various companies and technologies. The board of directors was impressed and Chris was given the task of developing a “design win acceleration program”. Chris’s team won the first internal design with Samsung and within 3 years, became the #1 antenna supplier in Korea. Chris was promoted to General Manager and opened offices in Taiwan and Copenhagen. Ethertronics was included in the Inc. 500’s list for the top 50 fastest growing companies in 2007 ( click here to see the press release). Ethertronics was a private company and it was apparent the board of directors was going to keep it this way for an extended time.

Qualcomm approached Chris about coming to work in their Enterprise Services (QES) group to invigorate their M2M group. Qualcomm (when launched) first utilized CDMA across a satellite network for the transportation industry. Many long haul trucks still use this solution today. The platform expanded into the construction vehicle industry where it was struggling. Chris met with many of the top customers and found that the biggest issue was the lack of unity among the various tools they were using. They had many different vehicles and each manufacturer had their own health management databases. The client also had their own internal databases (such as maintenance records and oil analysis). In addition, there were external databases coming from third parties. None of these databases were interconnected which made the solutions ineffective and too expensive. For these key customers, it became apparent that they needed to combine these databases in order to enable the use of advanced analytics to create predictive intelligence (click here to see the diagram) which made their business much more efficient and cost effective. In addition, this platform was modified to include an always on connection using 3G. Amazon was interested in offering a new Whispernet service for their Kindle device. We were able to launch this service and within months doubled the number of connected users on the service. This was used for other IoT offerings such as the MCOT device from Cardionet. Qualcomm decided to get out of this market and sold this M2M offering off to Verizon Wireless and spun off the Omnitracs product line.

Chris found that ControlPoint was also working with rugged vehicles in the military space similar to what Qualcomm was doing. Chris was tasked with marketing and business development. As part of this, Chris launched an extensive SEO overhaul of the website and began working with Fedbizopps as well as other portals. He also led the launch of several SBIR phase 1 proposals while getting ControlPoint on several contracting teams in San Diego. Chris got a secret security clearance and worked on an IDIQ with SAIC as a program manager.

The founders of NTest were friends from ADC and they recruited him to join them as VP of Marketing. Chris developed an Inbound marketing strategy which capitalized on the large competitors in this test and measurement space creating demand with their direct sales force. NTest would utilize their ad platform and SEO to capture these customers and based on the superior technology and lower overhead expenses, began growing very quickly. Analytics quickly became an important part of the technology. By taking advantage of the large amount of OTDR data as well as power monitoring data, the system could also be used for intrusion detection and security. Leads had increased by 400% and Chris picked up global sales to ensure each opportunity was able to convert into revenue. Chris was asked by a customer to get a Top Secret security clearance and quickly began rapid deployment of this Cyber Security solution. One example of this was the deployment with the National Security Shield (NSS) for Qatar Ministry of Interior and Armed Forces through Airbus. Today, NTest is the global leader in Remote Fiber Optic Monitoring Systems, offers FiberWatch™ to quickly locates fiber failures, detect network intrusions as well as predict fibers that are degrading and likely to fail for government, military and commercial customers Product utilizes OTDR sensors integrated into hardware platform and managed by NMS software (using Saas or server based system)