The Short Version

Where I work: Geneva Global

Other places I have worked: Results for Development, Global Integrity, U.S. Department of State; United States Senate; Center for Public Integrity

Things I have helped to build: Global Integrity, Foglamp, the Indaba fieldwork platform, the OpenGov Hub.

I work from: Paoli, Pennsylvania, USA

Homefront: outnumbered 3 to 1 by the women in my life: loving wife + two daughters.

The Longer Version

Born: Boston 'burbs

Raised: Washington, DC 'burbs

Things I was always interested in: politics, international affairs, technology, the Washington football team

Fun fact: grew up across the street from one of the FBI agents who busted former DC mayor Marion Barry for drug possession.

First job: file clerk in a three-lawyer domestic law firm in 10th grade. Taught me to never go to law school or become a lawyer.

College: University of Delaware. Tried to pursue triple major in Spanish literature, international relations, and computer science. Had to drop comp sci after two semesters of C++ due to lack of time. Still regret it to this day.

First professional job: worked at right hand of Center for Public Integrity founder Chuck Lewis as a James R. Soles fellow. Learned how to do investigative reporting and write a lede graf. With Chuck and his friend Marianne Camerer, stumbled across a better way of assessing transparency and anti-corruption in countries. Several years later this would become Global Integrity.

Grad school: Georgetown School of Foreign Service while working part-time at the Center. Split time between international security policy and international business diplomacy. Future Global Integrity board member Dale Murphy taught me about digital start-ups.

First lawsuit: sued (along with co-writer and the Center for Public Integrity) by Russian oligarchs for publishing story about Halliburton's ties to Russian companies linked to organized crime and drug running. Won lawsuit five years later in DC District Court thanks to great lawyers. Total legal bills ~ several million dollars. Validated decision to never become a lawyer.

State Department: 2002 - 2005 via the Presidential Management Fellowship program. Great job, great bosses, and great colleagues. Worked primarily on the NATO desk doing transatlantic security and U.S. military basing issues in Europe. Once traveled on a small private Air Force jet for a week in Europe with Doug Feith, one of the architects of the Iraq war. No kidding.

Global Integrity: left State Department to come back to non-profit work in October 2005. Was clear that Global Integrity (then a project of the Center called "Global Access") needed to be spun off from the Center in order to thrive. Incorporated Global Integrity on September 1 2005 with three months of money in the bank. Learned nonprofit fundraising real quick.

Foglamp: In 2008, realized investors might pay for custom research from Global Integrity's network of contributors in 120+ countries. Thought that could be a useful way to generate earned revenue for Global Integrity. It was.

Indaba: Refused to ever hire an "IT guy" or otherwise invest in in-house servers and technology. Global Integrity was doing cloud computing before most people had heard of the term. In 2006 helped to design MAGIC (Multi-user Access to Global Integrity Content), the organization's second-generation cloud-based data gathering and reporting system. This was replaced in 2009 with Indaba, which was designed as a software-as-a-service to be used by a wide range of organizations beyond Global Integrity.

OpenGov Hub: In 2011 I started talking with other organizations Global Integrity worked with in the Washington, DC area about collocating together in a shared office to increase collaboration and efficiency. A year later, the OpenGov Hub was born and currently hosts (in its second location) more than 200 staff from 35+ non-profit and commercial organizations in a custom-built 24,000 square foot space. It's pretty awesome.

R4D: In late-2014 I made a bittersweet career transition and left Global Integrity to join Results for Development (R4D); you can read plenty of details about the happy transition here, here, and here. After joining R4D I initially continued to work on my core issues of government transparency and accountability across health, education, and nutrition. My role later evolved into a more cross-cutting role (EVP for Integrated Strategies) in which I oversaw all of R4D’s functional teams: Accountability & Citizen Engagement, Innovation, Market Shaping, and Evaluation & Adaptive Learning.

Geneva Global: Fast forward to September 2019 - as part of another bittersweet transition, we decided to make a family move to the greater Philadelphia area to be closer to my wife’s family. I was thrilled to join Geneva Global as a managing director, responsible for all client-facing delivery as we work to make philanthropy more impactful.

Things I obsess over and waste time on: mobile devices and mobile operating systems (decreasingly); the National Football League (decreasingly); professional cycling (increasingly).

Number of mobile devices owned and used in past decade: around thirty, including iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Symbian, webOS, Palm, and Windows Mobile 6.x devices. 

Current hardware: 13" Macbook Air (2019); iPhone SE 2020, Kindle Fire HD