The Corps

December 13, 2000 — the day I stepped onto the legendary yellow footprints at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island. Those footsteps marked the beginning of a journey that would shape my perspective on life and lay the foundation for the man I would become.

I deployed twice to Iraq. The first was in November 2002, attached to the Marine Expeditionary Brigade in support of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF). The second came just a few months later. On March 19, 2003, I crossed the Line of Departure (LOD) as part of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, again with the Marine Expeditionary Brigade. I remained in-country through July 2003, serving through the completion of the first offensive.

After returning home, I was attached to the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit Special Operations Capable (MEU SOC) aboard the USS Belleau Wood (LHA-3). I often refer to it as “the MEU that would never be,” because unlike most MEUs that operate as maritime forces, we were re-deployed back into Iraq. In July 2004, we assumed control of the Karbala, An Najaf, and Al Qadisiyah provinces, eventually completing one of the longest land-based deployments for a MEU at that time — over seven months on the ground.

Much to my surprise, I left the Marine Corps on December 13, 2005 — five years to the day from when it all began. I transitioned to the Reserves between my EAS and 2007, but eventually stepped away from that chapter as well.

The Defense Contractor

Between 2006 and 2011, I worked as a Defense contractor, providing Subject Matter Expertise (SME) in geospatial technologies to the U.S. Army, Marine Corps, Navy, and NATO allies including Canada (CA), the United Kingdom (UK), and Australia (AUS).

During this time, I held a variety of roles — analyst, technical architect, project manager, and program manager — focused on the design and implementation of enterprise systems that supported range management and sustainment operations across the globe.

In 2011, I deployed to Afghanistan as the lead SME responsible for the development and rollout of an enterprise GIS capital asset system designed for the Afghan Ministry of Defense and Ministry of Interior. It was one of the most challenging and rewarding projects of my career — blending technology, cross-cultural collaboration, and mission-critical execution in an active conflict zone.

The Founder

In March 2011, while deployed in Afghanistan, I was invited to join the founding team of Sucuri. At the time, it was just three of us—curious minds exploring a project with no bigger ambition than creating something meaningful and maybe earning a little extra cash. By January 2012, we realized the potential and made the leap to go full-time.

I served as Chief Operating Officer (COO) from 2011 to 2014, helping lay the foundation of the company. My focus was on scaling our operational infrastructure—support, finance, administration, and more. At every step, our guiding question was: How do we deliver a high-quality service that truly makes a difference, in a way that is sustainable, repeatable, and scalable?

In June 2014, I was appointed CEO by the board, taking on a renewed focus on the company’s strategy and long-term direction. I worked closely with my friend and business partner, Daniel Cid—Sucuri’s founder and the creator of OSSEC—as we steered the company into its next chapter.

The questions evolved: What problem are we really solving? What unique value are we bringing to the market? It became less about building just a business and more about building a solution that mattered.

An Exit Arrives

On April 4th, 2017, Daniel and I signed the deal to sell Sucuri to GoDaddy. At the time of acquisition, I was appointed General Manager (GM) of Sucuri, which became a specialized unit within GoDaddy’s broader Security Product Group.

By October 2017, I was given the opportunity to lead the entire Security Product Group as General Manager—overseeing a much larger portfolio while continuing to advocate for strong, accessible website security solutions at scale.

Exploring New Ideas

In the fall of 2016, Daniel and I started voicing our frustrations with the lack of effective tools to secure our home networks. That conversation sparked an idea. Over the next two years, Daniel began experimenting with a solution that eventually became CleanBrowsing, officially launched in June 2018.

By 2020, after our departure from GoDaddy, we found ourselves once again in need of the very tools we had spent a decade building. With the world deep in a global pandemic and our own personal projects lacking adequate protection, we realized we couldn’t rely on free or inactive accounts. So we built NOC.org—founded in 2020—as a solution to our own problem, just like we had with Sucuri.

Then in 2022, we launched Trunc. While third in line, its roots actually go back further—originally intended as a fork of Daniel’s OSSEC project. That version never took off due to other priorities, but the need never went away. Years later, with a clearer vision and renewed urgency, we built Trunc to address a growing gap: a simple, affordable way to collect, store, and analyze logs at scale.

And in 2024, we released DNSArchive.net, a threat intelligence platform built on the vast amount of DNS data we were collecting across all our platforms. It’s the culmination of years of visibility into network-level behavior—transformed into actionable insights to help the broader security community detect and respond to emerging threats.