2 min read

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 a 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 were 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 became an EMC Company.
  • In October 2015, Dell and EMC agreed to the largest merger in IT history for a reported $67 Billion.
  • By late 2016, Dell and 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 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.

To be continued…