As you can see from the lack of updates to this blog, I’m a horrible blogger… I learned that maintaining a flow of interesting content is not one of my strengths. Consequently, updates to this blog will continue to be infrequent. However, here are some things I have been up to over the past 6+ years.
After leaving Akamai, I consulted predominantly with RampRate to help clients understand their Content Distribution Network (CDN) spending and ensure they were paying for appropriate services. The clients were large organizations spending millions on CDN services, so there usually was some part of their spending that was not appropriate.
In 2016, I started helping out at the College of Engineering for the University of Massachusetts (UMass) in Amherst, MA, as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence. My short description of this role is that I “help people turn crazy ideas into companies.” The college wrote a nice article about what I did for the students.
I also spoke to students in various classes about entrepreneurship, working in startups, and general career topics for engineers. I started teaching with “Startups for Engineers,” a seminar to give students an idea of what it takes to create a startup and deliver products. This turned into a course for the Master of Science in Engineering Management (MSEM) program entitled “Engineering Leadership and Entrepreneurship” MIE 664. It was a fantastic experience developing and teaching a course for MSEM students. I received my MS in Engineering Management from UMass in the 1980s, and it was great to contribute to the program and help students become better leaders.
I was fortunate to have the course adopted as a core part of the curriculum and have since passed it on to another entrepreneurial-minded instructor. I continue to be involved with the courses and instructors in the program.
As part of my involvement at UMass, I was a mentor for a startup in the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps program. The program helps move NSF-funded research from the lab to the marketplace by teaching entrepreneurial concepts and getting teams “out of the building” to find out the real problems that customers face. I have been an instructor for the UMass I-Corps site program at UMass, where we help them understand how to translate their research into products and services and prepare teams for the national program.
I continue to advise startups and have had the pleasure of watching a few become successful. I worked with a great group of folks in Launch413 which became an experiment in how to help startups. We used a revenue-based model to compensate the investors and advisors. The advisor team was fantastic but the deal flow for the model was not sustainable.