2000/09 - 2002/02. Chief Technology Officer - MightyWords Inc.
09/2000 – 02/2002 - Chief Technology Officer
MightyWords Inc. startup by Fatbrain, later acquired by Barnes & Noble
https://web.archive.org/web/20010822040910/http://www.mightywords.com/
MARKET: Media, Publishing, Online Publishing, eBooks.
As CTO, entire startup life-cycle from beginning, through industry leadership as the number one online ebookseller, to acquisition by Barnes & Noble.
Narrative
Coming Soon.
Statistics, Roles, & Responsibilities
80+ employees.
• Built entire IT department from scratch: facilities acquisition, in-house hiring, and multi-national third-party off-shore, VAR contracts $10M+
• Directly responsible and check-signatory for IT dept. annual budget $20M+.
• Lead R&D for industry changing DRM beating all competition & reducing industry standard Adobe DRM 50% support tickes to <5%.
• Lead development team from scoping, through QA, to full production and update releases
Frequent board and partner meetings, negotiated agreements & regularly worked directly with industry executives from: Adobe, Amazon, Barnes & Noble (B&N and BN.com), Microsoft, IBM, & many others.
Built entire technical infrastructure (servers, network, workstations, printers, firewalls, Internet connectivity, email, software, etc) from scratch.
Successfully implemented complete wireless (“secured”) LAN and wireless mobile user (“road warrior”) infrastructure keeping our sales, technical and executive staff well connected, with up to date information, and easy, constant access to resources.
Personally implemented complete V.O.W. (Virtual Office & Workplace) including VPN, audio & video conferencing, application sharing, and later handed off to Operation Team when those positions were finally filled.
Development Director in addition to maintaining CTO position
Managed the creation, development and successful deployment of an industry revolutionary DRM (Digital Rights Management) client and server technology.
Managed team of developers and administrators running a content management, e-Commerce, and co-branding system handling over 50,000 DRM managed PDF documents for sale, 100,000+ supporting images, over 150 distribution partner sites & over 5,000 content providers.
Architect & administrator of many “N-tier” environments on different scales as fit traffic and up time requirements.
HANDS-ON TECHNOLOGY EXPERIENCE
• Cybersource, CVS, Bugzilla, Rational Rose, Clearcase, and related suite of products
• TOAD DB Management
• Sun e220r (20+ systems), A1000 (4), D1000 (4), E450 (1), Ultra 10 (25+)
• Cisco Catalyst 19xx series, Netscreen 10
• Solaris 7, VA Linux systems (20+), Redhat, Mandrake & VA Linux 6.2 through 7.2
• Dell 1400 series servers
• PPTP & IPSEC
• Oracle 8.1.6 & 8.1.7 with Veritas, MySQL, Postgresql, MS SQL 2000,
• ACS, (Arsdigita Community System & CMS), Aolserver, Tomcat 3, Apache
• MS Exchange 2000 (Exchange/Outlook, IMAP, POP, SMTP)
• ADS, MS Windows 2000 Advanced Server, MS Project 2000 & MS Project 2000 Central Server,
• Qmail, Ipchains, Poptop Server, SMB, Cupsd,
• CDPD (AT&T Wireless & Verizon Wireless), Ricochet services (until their demise), Optistreams & Hughes Satellite Internet Satellite services (1.8Mbps down, 90Kbps up completely landline free system), Spread spectrum wireless T1.