I've spent thirty-five years getting hard technology out of the lab
and into the world.

I started in tech in the late 1980s at the first company to build commercial internet software for Macs and PCs. From there I got pulled into the standards bodies, the IETF and the ITU, where I ended up as technical and marketing chair for a communications protocol I co-invented.

At Ascend Communications I ran product management for TNT, the highest-density modem-based access concentrator on the market during the dial-up years of the dot-com boom. Then I took the 30 million lines of source code inside Ascend's access concentrator line, branded it as a monetizable operating system called TAOS, and grew that into roughly a $500 million per year business unit. When Lucent acquired Ascend for $24 billion, I moved into Bell Labs as a research manager, running a skunk works on next-generation telephony, internet access, and a fringe technology nobody had heard of yet: Ethernet over wireless.

That work put my group in the room with Steve Jobs. He had just returned to Apple and was designing what would become the first personal computer with built-in wireless networking. We built the original consumer Wi-Fi hotspot. Apple shipped it as the AirPort.

I kept moving. Cloud platforms. Early SaaS. Forty-plus products across a wide range of industries before surgical robotics ever found me.

I joined a startup commercializing a handheld robotic system for knee replacement surgery. That was the beginning of a fifteen-year run in the hardest version of this problem.

In 2016, Johns Hopkins called. They had technology that needed a commercial path. My co-founder and I licensed it, built Galen Robotics from the ground up, recruited most of the team, and set up operations, manufacturing, and engineering.

In July 2023, we received FDA De Novo clearance for the world's first cooperatively controlled microsurgical robotic assistant.

A 35-patent portfolio, licensed from Johns Hopkins and fully granted by clearance. $25.5 million Series A. Eight years of work.

Since clearance I've embedded with four more surgical robotics teams and about a half-dozen other hard-tech founders. All at the same stage: promising prototype, unclear path forward.

That stage is the one I know best, and it's where the decisions made in the next six months will either protect everything the team has built or quietly undermine it. Forty-plus products commercialized over thirty-five years, and the through-line is the same one: my interest has always been the little gears that bring technology together, and the work on the other side of the fence to get it into customers' hands.

Why this work

Commercializing hard-tech is the hardest version of this problem. Regulated products like medical devices sit at the most demanding end of it — the consequences of getting it wrong are real, and the regulatory environment doesn't forgive a sloppy program. Most founders are building something genuinely important and navigating it largely alone.

That combination is what keeps me in this work — hard problems that matter, with people who care about getting it right.