Liquid Web
I spent thirteen years building a managed hosting company from a small team into a $225M acquisition target.
Building the Company
I joined Liquid Web as employee number seven and grew with the company to COO over 450. I built the recruiting pipelines, stood up management structures, scaled support teams, and led compliance programs including SSAE16, HIPAA, and PCI DSS. I shaped the culture, made the day-to-day operational decisions, and helped drive the company to a $225M exit.
Designing the Network
I built a carrier-grade network from scratch in a secondary city. I sourced dark fiber IRUs, connected to the local ILEC over a DWDM ring, and extended lit services to upstream providers in larger metros. I ran BGP with full tables for external routing, EIGRP internally, and managed IX Peering, ARIN IP allocations, AS numbers, and DDoS mitigation through Arbor Networks. I owned the entire lifecycle — provider selection, contract negotiation, equipment procurement, Cisco and Arista configuration, fiber termination, and ongoing monitoring with Cacti, SNMP, and Netflow.
Building Data Centers
I designed three data center facilities from scratch — hand-drew the floor plans, designed the complete power chain from utility feed through rack-level branch circuit monitoring, and led an $80M ground-up build with a dedicated electrical substation. I managed all contractors, utility coordination, and equipment procurement across every build. I also drywalled the first data center, drilled through concrete walls for fiber, and terminated Cat 5e — when you're building from nothing, you do whatever needs doing.
Storm on Demand
I helped build our IaaS platform before "cloud" was mainstream — Xen and KVM hypervisors, self-service provisioning, object storage, load balancing, and firewall configuration. I helped recruit the engineering team, define the product spec, and build the physical and network infrastructure that powered it.
Linux at Scale
About 85% of our fleet ran CentOS — thousands of servers with custom Kernel builds, RPM packaging, PXE bare-metal provisioning, Apache, Nginx, and MySQL optimization. We hardened servers, monitored hardware and software, managed security patches, and kept uptime high across the entire fleet.
$225M Exit
I was one of five executives who led the sale to Madison Dearborn Partners in 2015. I prepared most of the data room, built financial models with our accountants, and personally presented to every potential acquirer throughout a multi-month process that culminated in a successful close.
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