Orb

It has been 18 months since I parted ways with Ookla. While I have remained engaged in the connectivity industry and enjoyed the time immensely, I am thrilled to announce my return to an operational role with the startup that I have been the most involved in. After leading a very successful funding round last quarter, I am now the CEO of Orb. The Orb team is dear to my heart, and we are creating something very special with our decades of experience in consumer connectivity. The idea that my great friend and recurring business partner Jamie Steven brought to me in the fall of 2023 has evolved into something much grander, and I am excited to become a significant part of unveiling it in the near future. With my shift to CEO, Jamie is now Orb President and will wear multiple executive hats. We worked together in a similar manner during some of my favorite and most successful Ookla years. My advisory roles with Hamina Wireless, Berkshire Partners, and Opensignal will continue. And since Orb won’t have a booth presence at MWC in March, there is a good chance that you will find me at either the Opensignal or Hamina booths. Please reach out to me or my esteemed colleague Tom Opaczyk if you want to meet with us at Mobile World Congress and glimpse behind the Orb curtain! In addition to the names tagged above and all those who have invested in Orb, I’d like to personally thank Jake Mutschler, Olivier Mignault, Josh Hardy, Meaghan Bauman, Edward Bender, Will Cooper, Jussi Kiviniemi, Tomi Heinonen, Drew Walker, Manish Goyal, Charles Rutstein, Sangita Patel, Shawn Heidel, Hunter Macdonald, and Kuljeet Randhawa for being key parts of my amazing 2024. Looking forward to doing extraordinary things together in 2025 and beyond!

I am delighted to share that I am joining Jamie Steven and the incredible team at Orb as Chief Technology Officer! ?? I could not be more excited to realize Orb’s cutting edge vision alongside some of the most thoughtful and impactful people I’ve worked with in my career! Ookla has been an incredible place that I am proud to have been a part of for nearly 7 years. I’d like to thank Doug Suttles and Marc von Holzen for trusting and empowering me early on to lead Ookla through a transformation from full stack PHP to a scalable distributed architecture capable of handling Ookla’s meteoric increase in scale and complexity over the last few years. I’d like to thank Luke Deryckx for believing in me to have even more impact as VP of Engineering, Stephen Bye and Brennen Smith for inspiring and conspiring with me to reach for new heights of innovation as leader of R&D. Finally, I’d like to thank every member of the teams I’ve led for trusting me, investing in me, and making my job incredibly rewarding by being some of the most brilliant, collaborative and supportive engineers I’ve ever worked with! At Orb, I’ll continue to invest in and leverage the incredible #Go ecosystem and the #OpenSource community, while bringing brand new products to market that I think you’ll love! Stay tuned! ????