Enlisted at 17
I joined the United States Marine Corps at 17 years old on June 17, 1997. Six-year contract that extended to approximately 6.5 years due to stop-loss — the military wouldn’t let me go. Nearly three of those years were spent on active duty.
My primary MOS was firefighter on the airfield in Crash Crew / Crash Fire Rescue. My side role — my “part-time job” within the Marines — was Information Services Coordinator, working on IP phone systems, networks, and infrastructure for the communications squadrons.
Training Injury — Chose to Stay
I was injured in a training accident at 17 — shrapnel to my head, arms, and hand. I was offered a medical discharge. I chose to continue service. “I gave my word, and it’s important to me. Honor, courage, and commitment.”
Security Clearance
Held a security clearance during service. This is where I first internalized the importance of maintaining security — an orientation that runs through every role from ID Analytics fraud detection to Oracle’s sovereign state infrastructure to FrawdBot’s insider threat detection.
The Cyber Attack — 3rd Marine Air Wing
I volunteered for Afghanistan. Then the 72-hour activation call came, and I got activated for Iraq. While deployed, most of my time was on the airfield in Crash Fire Rescue — sitting in fire engines at landing zones, watching helicopters and C-130s take off and land.
But I’d been teaching classes to the communications squadrons on my days off. Investing in my brothers. Training their comm spotters.
Then a cyber attack took out the entire 3rd Marine Air Wing’s infrastructure. The 3rd MAW — one-third of the United States’ aerial warfighting capability — was degraded. They couldn’t fully operate. This was the wing that ran combined arms exercises to prepare troops deploying to Iraq. Warfighting capability was compromised.
The call went out over the radio: “Where’s Mac? Where’s Mac? Where’s Mac?” — from comm chief to comm chief. The comm chiefs I’d trained their spotters at all knew who to call.
I was a reservist firefighter who happened to be one of the top network engineers in the world in my civilian career. I was pulled into a completely destroyed infrastructure. The entire network had been wiped and deleted. Systems were completely infected.
Within 72 hours, I rebuilt everything. Got the wing back online. Guided their leadership with project plans and operational frameworks to restore the remaining systems. Brought them to a functional level where they could execute their mission.
For this, I received the Navy Achievement Medal — the highest medal that can be awarded without being under direct enemy fire.
The Manufacturing Floor — Where Automation Started
At 18, I ended up on the manufacturing floor — the back end of a computer shop, building digital video surveillance systems for Pelco (the boxy cameras you see at banks). The CIA was refreshing their surveillance infrastructure and moving from tape to disk-based recording. The orders were endless.
This is where software-driven automation started. I got bored of clicking on things and plugging things in, so I figured out how to automate the manufacturing process. I used software to accelerate production, enabling the team to ship pallets of surveillance systems per day. The same instinct that would later drive DevOps toolchains, SRE transformations, and agentic AI was already there at 18: see a manual process, write code to eliminate it.
This is also where I first learned to bring nerds together and hack. First Linux installs. First OS installs (NT4). First experience building a team of technical people around a shared problem. I built the reservation system for the National Park Service from this environment.
DKA Online — Building an ISP at 18
At 18, I built DKA Online into one of Central California’s largest Internet Service Providers. This wasn’t a desk job — it meant physically climbing grain silos to shoot wireless links into rural farming communities that had no other connectivity options. Multiple POPs across California. Web hosting alongside physical network connections.
At 18, I was running a multi-POP ISP with web hosting and physical network infrastructure across California.
The ISP also built an early e-commerce system — Flash-based, competing with Gateway at the time. Decision trees that walked customers through product selection online and printed out sales orders for the sales team to process. Web-based e-commerce automation before e-commerce was a thing. The same instinct: use software to remove friction from a manual process.
This is also where I first got into converged voice and data technologies — learning phone systems, PBXs, the early IP telephony that would become Cisco’s Call Manager system. I did some of the first installs and configurations of what became Call Manager.
Knapp Publishing — Web Scale at 19
Led the bricks-to-clicks digital transformation of Knapp Publishing, a 100-year-old print company. But this wasn’t just building their website — portions of HP’s and Microsoft’s public-facing websites ran on the web infrastructure I built. At 19, I was building and operating web-scale infrastructure for two of the largest technology companies in the world.
The structure matters: I led operations on a development team. This was before DevOps existed as a concept — it was just how our team was structured. An ops person embedded with the developers, keeping the infrastructure running while the dev team built on top of it. The exact same pattern that would repeat at Openwave and that would eventually get a name — DevOps — a decade later.
The lesson I took from Knapp: The best way to manage infrastructure is to manage it with code. That single insight — learned at 19 on a dev team at a 100-year-old publishing company — is the thread that runs through every role in my career. Perl scripts at Openwave. DevOps toolchains at ePlus. SDN software at NexusIS. CI/CD pipelines at Oracle. Always Cool AI. Agentic systems today. It all comes back to managing infrastructure with code.
The Comb-Shaped Career Begins
When I first arrived in Silicon Valley at 19, I came across the Stanford d.school and learned the concept of a T-shaped person: deep expertise in one domain plus cross-functional breadth. I decided I didn’t want to be T-shaped. I wanted to be comb-shaped — multiple deep verticals, not just one.
Every 2–4 years, I get a little itchy and deliberately seek out something new. I go back to being a novice — with all the emotional burden of figuring it out, the vulnerability of not knowing. And then I go deep again.
The comb teeth that started forming in this era:
- Networking / infrastructure (Marine Corps → Openwave → ePlus)
- Software development / automation (manufacturing floor → Knapp Publishing → Openwave)
- Business building (DKA Online ISP → later NexusIS → ACB)
Not a generalist who knows a little about everything. A serial deep-diver who goes to expert level in each domain and carries all of them forward simultaneously. That career model started here — and it’s the reason I can build systems today that span security, compliance, AI, infrastructure, and business operations.
The Foundation
Everything that came after — the $113M Apple iCloud build, the $180M SDN business, the Oracle reliability transformation, co-founding a food tech company, building AI threat detection systems — traces back to these years. The Marine who rebuilt a wing’s infrastructure in 72 hours. The kid who automated a manufacturing floor at 18. The 19-year-old running web-scale infrastructure for HP and Microsoft. The instinct was always the same: see a problem too big for humans to handle manually, write code to solve it.