Cybersecurity is not a technology problem. It’s a problem that happens to real people — residents who lose access to city services, patients who can't receive medical care, families whose institutions stop functioning because someone decided their data was worth stealing.
I've spent thirty years making sure this doesn't happen — to people and to organizations. I'm not a vendor. I'm a practitioner with deep experience and I know that protecting an organization's ability to serve its community is a civic act, not a commercial transaction.
I did not invent the strategy of civic engagement. Rather, it was the world I grew up in. My family was always oriented to community and service — across generations we were pastors, city government workers, entrepreneurs, and board members. When I built my own company, civic engagement came naturally, like an inherited trait.
Like so many others, I fell victim to the .com collapse in the early 2000's. I was laid off, recently married, and the tech market was in absolute freefall. But I didn't wait for recovery to come; I started my own business. My wife didn't wait for recovery, either. She saw an opportunity for me to teach what I knew and helped me take a leap to start a computer security program at the City Colleges of Chicago.
Cook County reached out when its new voting system had malfunctioned. I spent two months on the analysis and I kept going — pro bono — for two more elections with the County. What followed was a 12-year forensic contract. The opportunity followed the commitment — not the other way around. This is now my principle.
Over six years, I trained more than 5,000 federal, state, and local law enforcement professionals, including the NSA, FBI, U.S. Secret Service, NYPD, and the military, at the very moment cybersecurity was becoming a national concern. I was not advising from the outside. I was building from the inside.
Data Defenders started with a conversation in a library, 21 years ago. A colleague pointed to a URL I'd registered and said, "Data Defenders — that has a nice ring to it." My colleague eventually decided he was too risk-averse to follow that ring, so I drove Data Defenders forward alone, but not for long.
Early on, I saw that organizations were spending millions on cybersecurity and still getting breached, not because the technology failed but because the model was structurally designed to leave them vulnerable. So, I built the solution. The cybersecurity lifecycle model is governance, process and procedure, and technical infrastructure management all working seamlessly together.
For me, leadership manifests in action. I didn't set out to be a leader. I just set out to get some things done.
The business is the expression of who I am, not the other way around. I am motivated to stop harm from occurring; protecting people and organizations from cybercrime is a natural outlet.
When a hospital is shuttered by ransomware, when a municipality's systems are compromised, the people who bear the cost are the residents, the patients, the families those institutions exist to serve. It's not a technology story. It's a civic one.
Every organization is unique. The right cybersecurity program should embrace and design for this uniqueness. It should not be force-fit or cobbled together from the latest and greatest industry products.
Organizations know who they are and what they need to protect. You bring this knowledge and we bring the expertise, the infrastructure, and the daily execution. With alternative models, the customer is passive, and the model keeps the organization vulnerable.
I serve on boards because the organizations are doing work that matters and governance is the foundation for how that work is protected.
In December 2025, I was accepted into the Leadership Greater Chicago Daniel Burnham Fellowship, not as a cybersecurity expert, but as a civic leader whose record of board service, community engagement, and institutional work demonstrated a needed way of thinking about what it takes to sustain community.
Child and family welfare agency serving greater Chicagoland.
2017 to present: Board Member · Risk Committee Chair · Nomination Committee
Serving individuals with disabilities in metropolitan Chicago.
2023 to present: Board Member · Operations and Risk Committee
Founded in 1879, the Club is a catalyst for action on important social issues of the day.
2024 to present: Board Member
Emmy Award-nominated professional chorus and orchestra that provides educational outreach to hundreds of Chicago high school students.
2024 to present: Board Member
International spiritual organization serving 56 countries across six continents.
2025 to present: Board Member
Civic engagement as practice, not credential: ongoing mentorship, committee leadership, and direct community investment.
America’s premier nonprofit resource partner of the U.S. Small Business Administration, providing free, confidential business mentoring to entrepreneurs and small business owners.
2018 to present: Volunteer and Mentor · Economic Empowerment
Since 1927, connecting Chicago’s top business and civic leaders with a mission to identify current and next-generation leaders.
2024 to present: Membership Committee
