Technology strategy & architecture
Enterprise platforms, infrastructure, cloud, integration, vendor strategy, technical roadmaps, and the teams required to make them cohere.
Technology executive · CTO · operator · systems leader
Building better systems for changing organizations.
I lead technology across enterprise systems, digital products, AI, cybersecurity, operations, and organizational transformation. I’m most useful when the technology is complex, the stakes are real, and the organization itself is changing.
Based in Greater Philadelphia.
About
I have always been interested in how people make worlds together.
I studied religion and philosophy because I wanted to understand how people make worlds together: how ideas become beliefs and identities, how beliefs become habits and culture, how culture shapes psychology and behavior, and how all of that accumulates into organizational and institutional life.
Science and technology taught me to look at the same world through systems, constraints, networks, feedback, evolution, and emergence. After more than two decades leading technology, product, operations, and organizational change, those ways of seeing have converged into a practical habit: I look for both the architecture and the human system living through it.
That perspective matters anywhere technology changes how an organization works. It becomes especially important when technology also carries ideas, learning, culture, or public purpose. In those settings, technology is not simply infrastructure. It shapes how knowledge moves, how people encounter the work, how trust is created, and what the organization can become.
Religion at Swarthmore · M.A. at Union Theological Seminary · doctoral work at Villanova
The through-line
Understand the architecture. Understand the people living through it.
The Work
Technology is never only technical.
Across commercial, mission-driven, and public-interest organizations, enterprise technology, digital products, AI, cybersecurity, operations, governance, and organizational change rarely stay in separate boxes. I work across those boundaries, translating strategy into systems and systems back into organizational capability.
Operations & organizational systems
Operating models, process, accountability, budgets, vendors, documentation, governance, and the connective tissue that turns strategy into execution.
Digital products & experiences
Products, platforms, publications, communities, learning environments, and audience or customer experiences that turn organizational purpose into something people can actually use.
AI & intelligent systems
Responsible adoption of generative AI, automation, and knowledge systems, with strong source grounding, clear accountability, useful guardrails, and human judgment kept in view.
Security, resilience & governance
Cybersecurity, privacy, identity, continuity, accessibility, documentation, risk, and governance as foundations rather than afterthoughts.
Executive translation & transformation
Connecting technology, operations, product, finance, risk, people, boards, and leadership so complex change can actually move.
How I Think
Make things clearer. Keep them alive.
I like clear ownership, direct communication, useful documentation, strong technical foundations, and enough freedom for smart people to surprise me. I make decisions. I just do not confuse decisiveness with omniscience.
01
Outcomes over authorship
I do not need the good idea to be mine. My job is to set direction, remove obstacles, give people room, and make sure good work becomes real.
02
Simplify complication
Complex systems can fail in cascades, and every unnecessary dependency is another path a failure can travel. Where complexity is genuine, I support it deliberately rather than pretending it away.
03
Understand before replacing
I treat legacy systems as adaptations rather than mistakes. Most of what looks like dysfunction was once a reasonable answer to a problem nobody remembers having. I want to know what it was protecting before I rip it out.
04
Strong positions, loosely held
I will argue for a view and make a call, then change it when reality changes. Architecture, strategy, organizations, and people are never finished.
05
Trust is infrastructure
No one sees the whole system. Integrity makes distributed judgment possible; without it, coordination decays into surveillance, politics, and defensive process.
06
Leave room for surprise
The best systems make more intelligence possible than their designer could supply. I want teams and platforms capable of discovering better answers than the ones we started with.
Influences
Philosophy, science, technology, and an unfinished world.
My thinking has developed through a long conversation among philosophy, science, and technology: Hegel and developmental thought; Whitehead and process philosophy; Teilhard de Chardin’s evolutionary vision; James P. Carse and infinite play; complexity science, emergence, evolution, and the sciences of living systems.
Just as formative has been a lifetime spent with computing, networks, software, AI, and technological systems themselves. I do not think of technology as the place where ideas get applied after the thinking is over. Technology changes what people can know and do, how organizations organize themselves, and what forms of relationship and possibility become available.
Still, in the deepest sense, a student of how people and systems grow, adapt, and discover new possibilities.
Writing
Ideas that have followed me into the work.
A small selection from a longer body of work on technology, evolution, philosophy, culture, and the kinds of futures we are making together.
What is the Metanexus?
A contemporary statement on process, emergence, technology, evolution, play, and an unfinished reality in which new forms arise through relation.
H+/−: Transhumanism and Its Critics
Co-edited with William Grassie, bringing advocates and critics into a serious argument about human enhancement, emerging technology, and what it means to remain human in a world we can increasingly redesign.
Spiral
An early piece on communication, participation, institutional feedback, experimentation, continuity, and change, written while Metanexus itself was being reimagined.
Where the Work Has Taken Me
The same questions, taking different forms.
My career has crossed industries, sectors, and organizational forms, but the underlying work has remained remarkably consistent: helping organizations use technology thoughtfully, navigate complexity, and build what comes next.
Select a chapter to see what I owned, what changed, and what I carried forward.
The mandate
Build and lead a firmwide technology program while co-leading much of the operating system around it: technology, HR, legal, vendor management, advisor support, client-service infrastructure, and cross-functional change across broker-dealer and RIA platforms.
What changed
Modernized cloud collaboration, CRM, communications, support, and cybersecurity; selected and managed a 24/7 MSP; directed custom automation and compliance-support tools; and led major transitions across accounting, payroll, compliance, vendors, and service functions without losing continuity.
What I carried forward
This is where the CTO/COO synthesis became explicit for me. Technology is never an isolated function: it is entangled with risk, people, contracts, service design, budgets, growth, and the everyday experience of work. The executive job is to make that whole system more coherent.
100+ staff, advisors & wholesalers
$1B client assets onboarded in 2024
Enterprise cybersecurity & resilience
Custom automation & compliance tools
The mandate
Reimagine a small ideas-driven nonprofit as a sustainable digital organization without flattening the intellectual depth that made it worth sustaining. I owned the whole picture: strategy, technology, programming, fundraising, communications, audience, operations, and the business model.
What changed
Built new digital offerings and revenue streams, introduced livestream and video programming, rebuilt the web, commerce, fundraising, collaboration, and publishing stack, secured the organization’s first product-development foundation grant, and radically expanded audience reach.
What I carried forward
I loved that the work refused to stay inside one functional box. Ideas, audience, technology, money, programming, culture, and organizational design all affected one another. It reinforced a conviction that the best executive work happens by seeing those relationships rather than optimizing each piece in isolation.
200%+ increase in net profits during the pandemic
850% YouTube growth
600% email-list growth
400% pageview growth
First product-development foundation grant
The mandate
Turn a big social idea into a product people would actually want to use. I owned product vision and roadmaps, hired and led a 20+ person onshore/offshore team across engineering, art, testing, and product operations, managed technology and cloud infrastructure, and partnered closely on the business model.
What changed
Built and expanded a global Facebook-era virtual world that reached more than four million players in over 130 countries and was credited with more than 40 million acts of good. I created the “Big Vision” roadmap, led feature development, reduced infrastructure cost through cloud migration, and helped translate ambitious purpose into actual product mechanics.
What I carried forward
This was technology as imagination, behavior, culture, and play. It taught me to lead creative and technical people together, to take blue-sky thinking seriously without losing delivery discipline, and to design for the possibility that a system can invite people into better forms of participation.
4M+ players
130+ countries
40M+ acts of good
20+ person global product team
$100M-film promotional partnership
Parallel chapter · BetterWorldians
During this period I also served as Co-Executive Director of BetterWorldians, co-led strategy, launched and co-hosted BetterWorldians Radio with nonprofit founders, authors, spiritual leaders, and other visionaries, and helped raise more than $300,000 through major-donor, web, and foundation fundraising.
The mandate
I began by running Metanexus Online and managing IT, then grew into leadership across technology, communications, publications, conferences, websites, and organizational strategy. The work sat exactly where technical systems, intellectual networks, public communication, and institutional purpose met.
What changed
Ran an online publication reaching 300,000+ monthly pageviews; built and managed websites, LISTSERVs, applications, and a custom FileMaker CRM; supported office and conference infrastructure; later moved systems toward the cloud to reduce cost and complexity; and worked with executive leadership and the board on a broader mission, rebrand, conferences, and global reach.
What I carried forward
This is where the pattern first became obvious to me: technology, ideas, communication, community, and organizational form are not separate domains. They are parts of one evolving system. Much of the way I think about executive technology leadership can be traced back to learning that here.
300K+ monthly publication pageviews
Technology + communications leadership
Custom CRM, web & publishing systems
Board-level strategic initiatives
The foundation
Before product strategy, executive leadership, or organizational transformation, there was infrastructure: troubleshooting networks, overseeing vendors, and working directly with the physical and logical systems that an enterprise depends on every day.
What the work demanded
Reliability, diagnosis, patience, precision, and comfort moving between layers of a system. The network included routers, switches, hubs, servers, and T3, T1, DSL, and LAN infrastructure spanning eighteen floors.
What I carried forward
I still like being close enough to the technology to understand what is actually happening. Strategy is better when it remembers that every elegant abstraction eventually lands on real systems, real dependencies, and real people who need them to work.
18-floor enterprise network
Routers, switches & servers
T3, T1, DSL & LAN
Vendor troubleshooting & configuration
Contact
Let’s build what comes next.
I welcome conversations about technology and operations leadership, digital strategy, AI, organizational transformation, product, risk, and ambitious executive work that crosses conventional functional boundaries.
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