Biography

Jay has been focused on building early-stage technology product companies for 30+ years. Having worked-in or started six (four venture-backed) startups, Jay has built teams and products for markets ranging from networking hardware to enterprise software. In 2007, he was the founding CEO of Acquia, a Sigma portfolio company which now employs over 750 employees in offices around the globe. Jay has recently shifted to the investment side, having become an active angel investor in Boston. He is deeply connected and committed to the two main tech accelerators in Boston, TechStars and MassChallenge, and has directly worked with 50-75 startups each year for these organizations beginning in 2013. His session on recruiting & hiring is the top-ranked talk at TechStars annually. With both organizations, he actively works with teams to utilize the Lean Canvas as a way to guide business-level thinking (vs. a more typical product-first view common among entrepreneurs).

Background

Jay has been CEO of three technology startups, including two venture-backed: Acquia, and Pingtel. Prior to this, Jay ran engineering as part of the management team that took ON Technology public in the 1990’s (NASDAQ) and was later acquired. He also helped the world understand the Internet and World Wide Web as the first analyst to cover it at Forrester Research in the very early 1990’s. He built the first industry’s first dial-up IP routers at Cayman Systems, and coded Unix OS software for a massively-parallel supercomputing system at Bolt Beranek & Newman (BBN).

Education & Recognition

Though Jay graduated from University of Denver College of Law, he doesn’t practice (and we don’t hold his law degree against him, since he knows enough not to try to be a lawyer.) Instead, he grew his career through software engineering, product management, and technology executive management.