I’ve always been interested in technology. When I was a kid growing up in northern New Jersey my father  would give me his old x86 computers to tinker with. I’d take them apart, put them back together, swap parts and attempt to break them so I could understand how to fix them. It wasn’t until he gave me his IBM PS/2 that I really started to understand the operating system, programming, and networking.

Fast forward to today and it’s no surprise that I’ve spent my entire career in technology; only I didn’t take a traditional path. Rather than get a job out of college I started my own company while on summer break from junior year – an information technology consulting company that serviced small and medium-sized businesses. After graduating from Bryant University in Rhode Island I ran and grew that company for 16 years, winning multiple awards along the way, until it was acquired in 2015.

Over the years I’ve founded or been involved in helping start almost two dozen companies – not all of them successes. Any good entrepreneur will tell you it’s the failures that you learn from, not the successes. Helping and advising startups is one of the things I continue to do today to keep my entrepreneurial spirit alive.

My first “real job” came when I joined Acquia, a Boston, Massachusetts-based venture-backed “startup”, as VP of Information Security & IT in late 2016 – a place where I could take everything I learned in technology and business and apply it to a thriving, fast-growing company to help drive operational efficiency and support long-term scalability.