I have been a lover of the ocean and littoral since he started surfing at the New Jersey Shore in the late 1970s.  My desire to design wave energy converters pushed me to study Coastal and Oceanographic Engineering at the University of Florida (go Gators) and my experiences with hydrographic surveying and the deployment of ocean instrumentation for engineering design applications led me to RD Instruments in 1999.   I helped  RD Instruments transition from a custom shop producing custom one off Doppler Sonars for the “wizards” of oceanography into an organization that had successfully “crossed the chasm,” expanding the use of standard products for much larger adjacent markets.   After RD Instruments purchased by Teledyne, I continued to partner with academia, govt, and commercial firms as they incorporated a variety of new ocean instrumentation into their research and operational programs.  I am especially looking forward to helping the StartBlue cohorts this year to put together a successful (differentiated, profitable) blue business.