James Thomason
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ABOUT ME
Startup CTO
Startup CTO
Creative and hands-on technology executive with 20 years of Silicon Valley experience and a career track record of $1.1B in successful acquisitions and IPOs. Led 2 startups in the last 5 years to successful acquisitions totaling $110M. Passionate about user experience and building amazing products that customers rave about. Believes that great leadership is by example, and builds organizations that encourage risk-taking to foster innovation. Wide-ranging technology expertise from software development and engineering, to automation, virtualization, cloud computing, machine learning, and web-scale infrastructure and operations. Strong preference for people, processes, and technologies that enable rapid experimentation, iteration, and progress. Writer for Forbes, Network World, Information Week, VMBlog, DevOps.com and featured in ZDNet, CRN, EWeek, The Register, and many more.
English
Pacific Time (US & Canada) (-07:00)
Joined January 2018
EXPERTISE
12 years experience
I've been a Rubyist developing Rails apps since 2006. Over the years, Rails has become my go-to tool for quickly turning ideas into real...
I've been a Rubyist developing Rails apps since 2006. Over the years, Rails has become my go-to tool for quickly turning ideas into real applications and APIs. Most recently, I created a Rails app as a front-end to a machine learning product called Semantiq that alerts parents to incidents of cyberbullying and abuse on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Previously, I created the a cloud and container orchestration solution (acquired by Dell in 2012) using Ruby and Rails to provision virtual machines and containers across heterogeneous computing clusters. Prior to that, I've used Rails and Sinatra in web scale computing environments where we created more than 150 different scale out microservices for Ning and other properties.
6 years experience
Most recently, as the CTO of Semantiq, I created a product using python, sci-kit learn, gensim, and Tensorflow to automatically identify ...
Most recently, as the CTO of Semantiq, I created a product using python, sci-kit learn, gensim, and Tensorflow to automatically identify incidents of cyberbullying and abuse on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. I wrote a custom NLP parser, stemmer, custom sentiment analyzer and text classifier (in python3) using several different supervised algorithms (SVM-TF+IDF, Naive Bayes, Doc2Vec). The system had 90% accuracy in positively identifying text that could indicate bullying, abuse, self harm, anxiety and depression in out of sample tests.
I also created a plugin for the Chrome browser called WiseMonkey to automatically hide posts with a high toxicity score, try it yourself at http://wisemonkey.io. The plugin works by scraping the text content of Facebook and Twitter posts, sending the text to a cloud API for scoring, and hiding posts with a high toxicity score. This project also required me to create a scale-out API that embedded the trained models, along with a CICD chain using Docker and Swarm.
12 years experience
As a data scientist, most of my experience has been focused on financial analytics for proprietary trading systems, and digital marketing...
As a data scientist, most of my experience has been focused on financial analytics for proprietary trading systems, and digital marketing analytics.
In the financial services area, at Greybox Capital I created custom analytics for time series and fundamental data using R and Matlab. Specifically, I wrote a custom system to create and measure time series of baskets of equity assets, test for cointegration, and create trading signals using Engle-Granger, Johansen, GARCH, and simple regression models. Later on, I rewrote this system for use in volatility arbitrage and (long) volatility dispersion models.
In the digital marketing area, at Rave Media we use R extensively to create models that optimize bid prices for media buys on Facebook and Twitter. I have also created systems that correlate click activity with user activity on landing pages for click fraud detection. I was interviewed by the New York Times and Washington Post to highlight cases of Google click fraud.
20 years experience
I have 20 years of Silicon Valley startup experience as an engineer, founder, and CTO with a career track record of $1.1B in successful a...
I have 20 years of Silicon Valley startup experience as an engineer, founder, and CTO with a career track record of $1.1B in successful acquisitions and IPOs. I led 2 startups as CTO in the last 5 years to successful acquisitions totaling over $100M. I am passionate about user experience and building great products that customers rave about. I believe that great leadership is by example, and I build organizations that enable risk-taking and foster innovation. My technology expertise runs the gamut from software engineering, to machine learning, NLP, automation, and web-scale cloud and web infrastructures. I have a strong preference for people, processes, and technologies that enable rapid experimentation, iteration, and progress.
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EMPLOYMENTS
CTO and Founder
Semantiq Technologies
2017-08-01-Present
Founded Semantiq Technologies in August of 2017 using machine learning to combat cyber bullying and other abuse online. Created patent-...
Founded Semantiq Technologies in August of 2017 using machine learning to combat cyber bullying and other abuse online. Created patent-pending classification engine and cloud API using a combination of supervised learning models (SVM+TF-IDF, Bayes, LSI, using Scikit-learn) and a custom NLP parser paired with unsupervised models for content discovery and classification (Gensim, Tensorflow). Released the WiseMonkey extension for Chrome to automatically block toxic and abusive posts from Facebook and Twitter newsfeeds.
Ruby
Python
Ruby on Rails
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Ruby
Python
Ruby on Rails
Machine Learning
Rails 5
Gensim
AI (artificial intelligence)
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CTO
Hypergrid
2015-12-01-2017-08-01
Recruited by the Chairman of the Board, created and executed a bold 2-year strategy to transform a legacy converged infrastructure ...
Recruited by the Chairman of the Board, created and executed a bold 2-year strategy to transform a legacy converged infrastructure startup into a revolutionary on-premises public cloud business, raising $35M in new venture capital.
* Led and completed the strategic acquisition of 2 private companies, DCHQ and XOcur, and successfully merged them with GridStore to form HyperGrid in 2016.
* Achieved rave reviews and awareness from customers and key analysts, increasing ASP from $140k in 2015 to $1M and revenue run rate from $5M in 2015 to $20M in 2017.
* Hands-on leadership, successfully scaled and trained a 12-person product team to over 50 engineers in just 9 months, recruiting two world-class engineering and product VPs along the way.
* Created a wholly-owned subsidiary in Noida, India, recruiting leadership and a 25 person development organization in 6 months.
* Modernized development tools and processes, transforming a slow waterfall-driven engineering team into a world-class agile development team, accelerating feature development and delivery by 600% in just 6 months.
Python
Angular
Linux
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Python
Angular
Linux
VMware
Docker
Google Cloud Platform
Product Design
Cloud technology & infrastructure management
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CTO
Dell
2013-01-01-2015-12-01
Headed the incubation and launch of Dell Cloud Marketplace, a first-generation cloud brokerage platform for public IaaS, acquiring seve...
Headed the incubation and launch of Dell Cloud Marketplace, a first-generation cloud brokerage platform for public IaaS, acquiring several thousand mid-market customers in the first 9 months since launch.
* Operating budget of $20M with 75 employees distributed between China, Ireland, India, New Zealand, and the United States.
* Hands-on leadership of product development team to successfully deliver Dell Cloud Marketplace from the acquired assets of Enstratius from concept to production in just 6 months.
* Developed and negotiated critical partnerships with Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Joyent, Digital Ocean, CenturyLink, Docker, Mesosphere, and a dozen more.
* Filed 8 patents in related areas, and initiated a discovery exercise with team resulting in 22 newly identified patentable technologies.
* Ongoing external evangelism and relationship building with over 50 members of the press and analyst community.
* As Dell Patent Committee member, reviewed and collaborated on over 200 patents. As a technology strategist for Dell Ventures, identified emerging opportunities and headed technical due diligence efforts for a number of investments and acquisitions.
* Sr. Distinguished Engineer, CTO Office, Dell Software Group
See:
http://www.informationweek.com/cloud/infrastructure-as-a-service/dell-cloud-marketplace-many-clouds-one-dashboard/d/d-id/1317218
http://www.zdnet.com/article/dell-launches-into-cloud-brokerage-market-with-cloud-marketplace/
https://451research.com/report-short?entityId=83223
http://www.programmableweb.com/news/dell-leverages-api-to-create-cloud-marketplace/2014/11/10
http://thomason.io/2015-year-of-the-whale-and-other-disruptive-trends-in-it/
Python
Java
Ruby on Rails
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Python
Java
Ruby on Rails
Angular
Google Cloud Platform
Product Design
Java, jee
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