The hindsight 20/20 storytelling goes something like this… but my meandering career path was anything but planned.
- I was born and raised in Beaufort, North Carolina.
- During high school, great teachers helped me land an Office of Naval Research internship at Duke University Marine Laboratory.
- Before college, great teachers helped me land an Department of Energy honors program slot at Argonne National Laboratory.
- Eventually, I graduated from North Carolina State University with a BS in Materials Science and Engineering.
- After my co-op at IBM doing TCP/IP benchmarking in development data centers, I dropped out of graduate school to be a digital nomad.
- My first consulting roles involved nascent LAMP stacks for web based OAM&P at Nortel in both development and production data centers and side-gigs with stealth startups.
- By 1999, I was consulting at Fortune 500 companies while managing software engineers and infrastructure architects for boutique .com consulting firms in state of the art production data centers, peering points, and colo’s around the globe.
- By 2002, I was hired as CTO at NeoNova to digitally transform and grow a business that manages Internet services and data centers for telecommunications companies.
- By 2007, I was hired as VP, GM, and CTO at Digitel to digitally transform and grow a business that manages converged voice and data services in peering points and data centers for VARs.
- By 2009, I launched Cuthrell Consulting LLC to revisit my digital nomad roots of consulting, investing, advising startups, and blogging.
- In 2009, the Acadia and the Virtual Computing Environment coalition are created by Cisco and EMC with additional investments from VMware and Intel.
- In 2010, as luck would have it, I met some folks from Cisco and EMC working for Acadia and I joined the team thinking it would be a year long engagement.
- By late 2010, Acadia and the Virtual Computing Environment coalition combine to form VCE.
- By 2012, VCE approached $0.5 Billion Annual Run Rate.
- By 2013, VCE reached $1 Billion Annual Run Rate.
- By late 2013, VCE reached $1.8 Billion Annual Run Rate.
- By October 2014, VCE is considered to be the most successful joint venture in IT history.
- By 2015, VCE exceeded $3.0 Billion Annual Run Rate and becomes an EMC Company.
- In October 2015, Dell and EMC agree to largest merger in IT history for a reported $67 Billion.
- By late 2016, Dell EMC were combined and by 2020 became known as Dell Technologies.
- In 2020, my time at Dell Technologies ended and my next adventure in multicloud took me to a Faction, a Dell Technologies Capital portfolio company.
- By late 2022, my time at Faction ended as I once again returned to my consulting roots.
- Now, 25+ years later, I am fortunate to be able to return to IBM and apply all that I have learned to What’s Next.