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 global product management for access concentration during the dial-up years of the dot-com boom. I named and productized our internal operating system, which we called TAOS. When Lucent acquired Ascend for $24 billion, I moved into Bell Labs, running a Skunk Works facility working on next-generation telephony, internet access, and a fringe technology nobody had heard of yet: Ethernet over wireless.

That work put us 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. My group built the first consumer Wi-Fi hotspot. Apple sold it for years.

I kept moving. Cloud platforms. Early SaaS. Forty-plus products across a wide range of industries.

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.

Thirty days after clearance, the company was taken in a hostile takeover. The group that took over failed. The company is a defunct shell today. I'm working to recover the IP and bring it back. That work is ongoing.

Since clearance I've worked on four more surgical robots and about a half-dozen other medical devices. All of them at the same stage: promising prototype, unclear path forward.

That's the stage I know best. And it's the stage where the decisions made in the next six months will either protect everything the team has built or quietly undermine it.

Forty-plus products. One through-line. I know what it takes to get from here to cleared.

Why this work

Medical device commercialization is the hardest version of this problem. The regulatory environment is complex. The consequences of getting it wrong are real. Most founders are building something genuinely important and navigating it largely alone.

I find that combination challenging, satisfying, and worth doing well.