Back from the Brink; still crossing the chasm

No, this post is not about ancient dragons nor is this a about preventing nuclear war. However, when there is a five-year gap between blog posts, it begs an explanation.  Allow me one paragraph as segue and then my explanation follows.

Back in the day, I taught networking technology at Kennedy Space Center. I was introducing what was then cutting-edge digital tech to people who had landed men on the moon using mostly analog tech and slide rules. That led me to an adventure in high tech highlighted by 15 years as an executive with Cisco Systems—once the fastest-growing tech company ever, rivaled today only by giants like NVIDIA.   I helped the internet reshape the world. I then spent 15 years providing C-suite consulting through the company I had founded, Loom LLC. That let me work across sectors of agtech, biotech, nonprofits, alternative energy, social media app creation, and more. 

Fast forward to 2020, the dates of my last blog posts.  While living in Lexington, KY, I had started a company focused on AI-driven aerial drone technology. Then came the pandemic.  I was in California with a group of Christian business leaders, returning home days before the nation locked down.  For the next 2 years my wife, a GM in the hospitality industry, kept her hotel afloat with sheer grit while I did the same for the drone startup.  At the end of 2021, her corporate offices asked her to move to Fort Worth, Texas, which was an excellent area for me to find aerospace talent for my drone company.  I arrived in Texas on Christmas Eve 2021.

But life had more twists. The drone business faltered when a key vendor failed to deliver. Meanwhile, my wife faced a cancer diagnosis.  Her resilience, great doctors, and God’s blessing prevailed.  After a year of treatment, she had beaten cancer and continues to have an increasingly positive prognosis.   

In late 2022, with my experience in faith-based non-profits, I pivoted to Washington, D.C., accepting the CEO role of an apolitical, secular nonprofit focused on bettering the complex issues associated with immigration.   Over two challenging years, while traveling weekly to D.C. like an elected House or Senate politician, I helped renew and stabilize that nonprofit handing it back to a next generation of leadership.  Near the end of 2024, I returned home full time—to my wife, to Fort Worth, and quite surprisingly to the high-tech industry.

Having researched emerging technologies and having spoken to mentors such as John Chambers and Vint Cerf, I was convinced that AI was going to be even more disruptive than the emergence of the Internet.  This was going to be followed quickly by the world altering abilities of quantum computing.  After much searching, I found some of my old Cisco associates working in stealth mode to bring forth a unique combination of AI-enabled, networking technology with an architecture that will survive and thrive in the quantum world yet to come. 

Loom is still open for business.  However, I’m now one of the leaders at WhiteStar Communications, back in tech, driving AI-enabled networking. From the early internet to now, my mission has been clear: ensuring that technology, whether that is the internet, AI, or quantum computing, are used to protect democracy, not to erode it from within and not to attack it from afar.  Tech will change, but the values we stand for and my mission to protect them hold firm. Well run businesses able to appropriately partner with a tech knowledgeable government are the bricks and mortar that make up the wall of protection.