Born in Charlotte, North Carolina (USA), I made my way via Washington, DC and San Diego, California to Paris, France, then returned to Charlotte for several years before coming back to France.
Before leaving Paris, I served as the Director of Strategy at Dassault Systèmes Exalead. While back in Charlotte, I worked independently with Dassault Systèmes corporate, EXALEAD, and several leading French software start-ups. I have continued in this role since my return to France, providing thought leadership commmunications, market analysis, business planning and analyst relatons support.
Prior to joining Exalead, I taught Business Process Reengineering, Management of Information Systems and E-Commerce in the Internaltional BBA/MBA program at ISG (l'Institut Supérieur de Gestion) in Paris. Before coming to Paris, I founded and served as CEO of AVENCOM, Inc., a software development company specializing in online databases and database-driven Internet applications (acquired by Red Door Interactive in 2004). I also served as VP of Marketing for Kintera, Inc., a provider of SaaS software to the nonprofit and government sectors, assisting them in their post-IPO transition from a privately-held to publicly-traded company. Prior to that, I served as the Marketing Manager for Legal Arts Multimedia, where in addition to my marketing duties I developed courtroom tutorials to assist judges and juries charged with adjudicating technology-related intellectual property litigation.
After beginning my undergraduate studies in Computer Science, I earned an M.A. in English from the University of Maryland, where I was also a candidate in the PhD program, studying Medieval Literature, Classical Rhetoric and Linguistics. Before launching into into my dissertation, I took a short detour back into the tech world to replenish my bank account at the Federal Systems Engineering division of Bell Atlantic (now Verizon) in Washington, DC. Needless to say the short detour has persisted many years now, with my medieval studies complemented by a long stream of 'related' coursework on topics such as LAN/WAN design and administration, relational data modeling, ColdFusion scripting and SQL programming.