Hi, I'm Chris.
I started working in technology in 1999. I began with systems, networks, and infrastructure. Over time the jobs got wider. I ended up working on products, engineering teams, ecommerce, subscriptions, data, growth, and the rest of what comes with building a company.
The short list is Beatport, Shutterstock, Reonomy, Aaptiv, Apply Stickers, TRX, and Wahoo. Right now I am building Goodword and running Wolf Works.
That list is useful, but it does not explain what I was doing all those years.
I joined Beatport in 2006. It was a young online music store with a growing catalog and a lot of infrastructure work to do. I worked on storage, servers, networks, delivery, reliability, budgets, and hiring. I was a systems administrator when I arrived and was running the technology group a few months later.
I moved to New York in 2009 and joined Shutterstock in 2010. We built infrastructure and developer tools for a much larger marketplace. The company went public in 2012. I stayed through 2015, by which point the systems and the engineering organization were both much larger than when I started.
Then I moved into a series of startup jobs. Reonomy worked with real-estate data. Aaptiv built consumer fitness and coaching products. Apply was a small ecommerce business selling licensed stickers and other physical products. TRX was trying to add a digital membership business to a hardware company. Wahoo sold connected fitness hardware, software, subscriptions, and accessories.
Those jobs were different, but the work usually came down to something fairly ordinary. Figure out what is actually happening. Get the right people in a room. Decide what to do next. Build it. Fix what does not work.
I was also doing a lot outside work.
I started a consulting company while I still had a full-time job in Colorado. I bought a loft at 60 Broadway in Brooklyn. Amanda and I later bought a badly damaged Victorian in Poughkeepsie and spent years working on it. I tried small businesses and software ideas. Some made money. Some got a domain name and not much further.
I run and ride bikes. I have raced marathons, triathlons, and duathlons. In 2021 I won my age group at the USA Triathlon Draft-Legal Sprint Duathlon National Championships. In 2023 I rode from Los Angeles to New York in 29 days with friends and a very patient support crew.
Amanda and I have been together for fifteen years and are finally getting married. We had a dog named Eva for a long time. She died a couple of years ago. Mona is our dog now and is excellent. My mother and father also died during these years. I do not want to turn any of that into a neat lesson. It was part of my life while the work was happening.
Goodword grew out of my interest in relationships and the practical problem of keeping up with people. Wolf Works is where I help founders and teams build products, repair systems, work through technical or operating problems, and get new companies moving. That can include product and engineering leadership, infrastructure, data engineering, AI systems, ecommerce, growth, or whatever the company actually needs.
Wolf of Williamsburg is the side-project section. It is a running list of businesses, property ideas, software, hustles, and other attempts. The name is a joke about The Wolf of Wall Street. I am not much of a finance guy. I am very much a person who hears an idea and starts wondering whether it could be a real company.
This site is where I am writing the stories down. I am using the old emails, documents, photos, training logs, and public records to keep the dates and details straight. Some posts are about work. Some are about sports, houses, family, or whatever else was happening that week.
The homepage map has the short version. The archive has the rest.