I am a lawyer turned entrepreneur (and no, I’m not that baseball player). After a brief stint in the legal world, I jumped into the start-up and never looked back.
Over the past 12 years, I have co-founded and helped lead two high-tech start-ups from conception to successful exits, generating over $70 million of shareholder value in the process. At the office, I love to work “heads-down,†studying markets, developing product innovations and being the company’s written voice. At home, I have a wonderful wife and three children.
After law school at the University of Minnesota, I served two years for a US District Court Judge before leaving to co-found NameProtect.com, a vertical search engine company for Intellectual Property professionals based in Madison, Wisconsin. During my 8-year tenure as NameProtect’s President, the company secured over $5 million in outside funding and grew from a business concept into a profitable company with a strong brand in its market and a global customer base that included Fortune 500 organizations such as Bristol Myers Squibb, Unilever, 3M, and Visa, among others.
I left my operating role at NameProtect in December, 2005, and continued to serve on the NameProtect Board of Directors up until the private sale of the Company in April 2007 to Corporation Services Company, a leading provider of corporate legal services.
My second start-up, Jellyfish.com, was also co-founded with Brian Wiegand. Working with Brian and a fantastic team, we led the company from conception to a private acquisition by Microsoft Corporation in less than two years. The Jellyfish.com search engine now serves as the framework for Microsoft’s Live Search cashback program. I spent some time working at Microsoft post-acquisition as Director of Product Management, but I missed the thrills of the start-up world, and left with Brian in June 2008 to start our latest creation, Alice.
I am currently the President of Alice.com. Alice is taking a new and innovative approach to a pretty stodgy industry—Consumer Packaged Goods. I’m really excited to have the opportunity to disrupt in such a huge market and use my experience and passion to give consumers a fun and completely different way to shop for these goods online.
I’m a member of the Wisconsin Bar, and hold degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (BA with honors) and the University of Minnesota Law School (JD magna cum laude).
