For more than thirty-five years, I’ve been fortunate to work with many great people and companies in higher ed, social ventures, software and IT services.
Ingenuity, personal drive, and a life led by showing respect for others are the qualities that attract me. Fortunately, I’ve been enriched by so many around me modeling these qualities. Their examples are what motivate me, as much today as at the beginning of my career.
Currently, I serve as Associate VP of Research at University of Texas at Dallas (UT Dallas). Immediately prior, I was Executive Director of the Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, where I also taught innovation and entrepreneurship at the undergraduate and graduate levels, as a Clinical Associate Professor. The graduate entrepreneurship program for UT Dallas has been ranked in the Top 25 in the nation since 2016-17, reaching #11 in 2018-19, under my watch.
I’m also managing director for the private consultancy and family office, BroadBrush Ventures (BBV). On the consulting side, BBV primarily performs branding, promotion, and other strategic & tactical marketing projects for new ventures. On the family office side, we make occasional investments in unique social ventures.
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Previously, I served for nearly a decade as a co-founder of Appconomy, Inc., a mobile software company operating in China, and an executive for nGenera Corporation (now Moxie Software), a venture-backed enterprise 2.0 software and services company.
Before that, I served as director of information technology for Bridgepoint Consulting LLC, the top accounting and finance management consulting firm in Central Texas, and as president of Perceptive Sciences Corporation, a leading U/X design and research firm.
I began my career with Arthur Andersen’s Management Information Consulting Division, or MICD (later, becoming the core of what is now Accenture) followed by PricewaterhouseCooper’s consulting group (now part of IBM Global Services) where, in both cases, I specialized in advanced technologies.
At MICD/Accenture, I was part of the team that developed the firm’s first commercial, PC-based manufacturing software. I continued the work in advanced technologies at PwC, where I prototyped add-ons to the firm’s pioneering, PC-based ExperTax expert system.
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In the late 1980s, I was among a small handful of founding shareholders of BSG Corporation, a start-up, client/server systems integrator. Through much of the 1990s, BSG emerged as among the largest, most innovative of the new generation of IT services companies.
I served BSG as the chief executive of two of its business units, director of firm-wide HR and IT, and ultimately managing director of BSG’s marketing communications group when BSG was acquired in 1996 for $350 million.
I was instrumental in obtaining prominent coverage for BSG by media and analysts, including the New York Times, Fortune magazine, Fast Company, Gartner Group, Forrester Research, and author Geoff Moore’s Inside the Tornado, the follow-up to his landmark Crossing the Chasm.
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Upon leaving BSG in 1996, I became active in both new business ventures and community consulting. I served for a year as the full-time CEO of the non-profit Easter Seals-Central Texas organization, serving 22 counties, including Austin and much of central Texas.
In 1997, I was recognized by the Austin American-Statesman as one of the “Heroes Among Us” for my charitable work and as one of the outstanding “Austinites Under 40” by the Young Men’s Business League and the Young Women’s Alliance in their first annual awards ceremony. (Perhaps my greatest claim to fame is my fellow inductees that year, which included among others Michael Dell, Mike Judge, and Lance Armstrong.)
In 1999, I co-founded and served as chairman of the board of Knowbility, Inc., a recipient of the Peter F. Drucker Foundation’s Special Recognition award as among the most innovative non-profit programs in the country.
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In 2002, I co-founded the Austin Clean Energy Initiative (ACE) with Richard Amato and Allan (“Chip”) Wolfe to promote the clean energy industry, which was later adopted by the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce as a vibrant new economic cluster for the Central Texas region.
I have also served as a member of the Austin Community Foundation board of governors, as a founding member of Austin Social Venture Partners, as a member of the board of directors of AMOA-Arthouse, as an advisory council member of SXSW Interactive, and as a member of the business advisory council for Earth Share of Texas, among other organizations.
In 2011, I was recognized by InnoTech and the greater Austin chapters of SIM and the Association of IT Professionals with their IT Executive of the Year Community Leadership Award for my work on behalf of the IT profession among business, civic, and non-profit groups.
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I enjoy mentoring and advisory work, engaging with every kind of entrepreneur. I’m an informal advisor for Powershift Group, where I’ve served as an entrepreneur-in-residence and venture studio member. I’m also a former mentor for Capital Factory, where I also previously as Director for Corporate Innovation, bringing together large enterprises with Capital Factory’s startup ecosystem.
I also have had the pleasure of lecturing as a professor in the Entrepreneurship and the MBA programs for UT Dallas and St. Edward’s University, resp. Other programs for which I’ve served as a mentor include REVTECH (Dallas), Galvanize (Austin), the Seamless Accelerator (Grand Rapids, MI), Chinaccelerator (Beijing CHINA), the Social Venture Partners Accelerator (Mission Capital, Austin) and the Clean Energy Incubator Success Committee (Austin Technology Incubator).
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I graduated from Howard Payne University, receiving a BS in Economics, summa cum laude, where I was a Hatton W. Summers Scholar and the Outstanding Male Graduate of the Douglas MacArthur Academy of Freedom.
I continued on to graduate school at Texas A&M University, receiving a MBA in Business Computing Science, with honors. I am also a proud alunnus of the Leadership Austin class of 1996-97 and a graduate of the Leadership Development Program of the Center for Creative Leadership.
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The BroadBrush Update 