About Jason
I learned by building because I did not have another path.
I grew up moving between trailers, rentals, and a group home. The early web gave me something concrete to work on, and I have been following hard systems ever since.
I am a product and engineering leader who works on hard infrastructure problems and the customer problems they create. I led Azure Blob product work, including the Azure-side storage relationship supporting OpenAI and Microsoft AI. Today I lead cloud product work at VAST Data. I also still write code, direct coding agents, operate Kubernetes at home, and build an AI-assisted greenhouse with my adult son.
The career only makes sense with what came before it. I grew up in Boulder County with two parents who never finished high school, very little money, a lot of instability, and plenty of love. The rest includes the early web, a teenage Linux obsession, a city-council race at twenty-one, years of side projects, twelve and a half years at Microsoft, and a return to the program that once kept me from falling through the cracks.
I did not take a traditional path. I learned to open the system, figure out what it was doing, and keep going until I could make it useful. That is still how I work.
A few adults kept showing up
I was born in Boulder in 1981 and have lived in Boulder County for almost all of my life. My mother cleaned houses. The father who raised me drove trash trucks for his entire career. Neither of them graduated from high school. They divorced when I was nine, and after that we moved through trailers and rentals across the Front Range. By the time I graduated, I had attended seven schools.
The summer before eighth grade, my mother had fallen in with the wrong crowd. She lost her job, we were about to be evicted, and her brother called Social Services. I was taken into the custody of the State of Colorado and lived in a group home while a court fight played out. Eventually, my dad got custody.
I tell that plainly because the next part matters: I was not alone. In fourth grade, I had joined one of the earliest Boulder County classes of the “I Have a Dream” Foundation. Its coordinators stayed with the same group of kids for years. When our phone had been disconnected, one of them would drive to wherever I was living and knock on the door just to make sure I was okay. That kind of consistency is difficult to explain to someone who has always had it. For me, it was an anchor.
The program also helped me get a summer internship in the University of Colorado’s financial aid IT department. I was fourteen. That internship turned into my first real technical job: Assistant Network Administrator, administering AIX, Windows NT, and Novell systems and building small Perl and JavaScript tools while I was still in high school. At eighteen, I enrolled in evening classes at Front Range Community College, paid my own way, and worked full-time. After roughly three semesters, I chose the job. I do not have a completed degree. I kept working and learning there instead.
“The program was the only consistency in my life after my parents divorced and we moved around a lot.”
I got stuck in public and kept going
In March 1996, when I was fourteen, Centennial Middle School’s online newspaper,Vocal Point, published an article I wrote about Bosnia-Herzegovina. I wrote other pieces and helped publish the paper. One direct byline survives. Another student had designed and programmed the publication’s original HTML platform before I joined.
That same year, I built ThinkQuest entry 3516 with two other students. It was an astronomy learning site called Shooting for the Stars, with beginner, intermediate, and advanced paths, search, discussion surfaces, an image map, and a frankly enormous number of images for the era. We participated in the inaugural 1996 program. What stayed with me was the feeling of making something that strangers could reach.
By February 1997, an archived Boulder Valley School District page identifies me asguide4, one of the student Internet Guide volunteers who helped other district users. It was a rotating student account, and that page captures the period when I used it.
At sixteen, I was publicly asking my way through Perl on Windows NT Server and IIS: routing multi-page forms, updating files, generating confirmation pages, and making redirects work. A separate 1998 set shows me building a Linux development kernel and troubleshooting Red Hat. The exposed Boulder Linux Users Group archive then preserves seventy-two messages under my name from 1999 through 2011: Linux, networking, PHP and MySQL, VPNs, S3 backup, ham radio, virtualization, and storage. Together they show the way I learned: put my hands on the system, get stuck in public, and keep going.
The side projects were how I learned the next system
I started Brio Solutions in my early twenties and built LAMP-stack sites and hosting systems beside my full-time job. I wrote tools to backtest stock strategies and experimented with an eBay auto-bidder. In 2006 I launched NewsPicker, a working Pligg-based social-news site, and later moved it to Mine Feed. I built a small local-news-to-RSS bridge because the newspaper did not have a feed, and a request-echo tool because I needed to see exactly what a web service was sending. I customized and ran the Pligg-based system rather than writing the underlying engine from scratch. It was small, but it worked and taught me how the pieces fit together.
In 2007, I wrote a Gmail IMAP tool to extract, deduplicate, and rank email addresses, then split the results into files small enough for social-network contact imports. That utility became GmailExtract, then MineMyMail, a bootstrapped product that people were still using in 2016. It was small and imperfect, but it solved a real problem.
The current expression of that impulse is more ambitious. I operate a private platform for coding agents on Kubernetes. I build Verdify with my adult son, James: a real greenhouse controlled by deterministic ESP32 firmware, with AI allowed to tune only bounded parameters. The model may propose a change, but the firmware owns safety and telemetry has to verify the result. That is how I think powerful automated systems should meet the physical world.
Support taught me to listen. Delivery made the consequences real.
My professional career moved from support into software, architecture, delivery, product, and organizational leadership. At SHL, I progressed from client support through software development and technical integration project management. At NewsGator, I worked first in enterprise project delivery and later as a solution architect on social collaboration for SharePoint. At Avanade, I led delivery and directly managed onshore and offshore engineers and project managers. At Neudesic, my work centered on product management for Pulse, its enterprise-social product, while my formal public title was Director, Technical Solution Sales.
I joined Microsoft on April 15, 2013, as a SharePoint Premier Field Engineer. By late 2014 I was a Cloud Solution Architect, helping partners and customers make the move to Azure. I joined while the Azure field organization was still tiny and helped interview candidates as Azure moved from incubation into the mainstream.
In the summer of 2017, I moved into Azure Storage product management. By the end of that chapter, my public-facing title was Group Product Manager, Azure Blob Storage. I led product managers and technical program managers across two connected functions: strategic engagement with the largest storage customers, and the customer-facing Blob experience: APIs, SDKs, client tools, tiering, pricing, and usability. I functionally led work across engineering, with product ownership and dotted-line accountability.
One of the cleanest public code artifacts from the earlier Microsoft years is small enough to inspect: in 2015 I opened an Azure Resource Manager quickstart for a high-IOPS VM with thirty-two data disks and a storage pool. The five-file, 614-addition pull request and its README follow-up both merged. Azure changed it later, and the current successor still carries my GitHub handle in its metadata.
The models still needed storage underneath them
I came home from my first meeting with OpenAI in 2017 and sat beside my wife, stunned by the future the researchers described. They were already reasoning about a world I had not yet fully seen. From that point forward, I wanted to understand where it was going.
From 2017 through 2025, I led Azure Blob product work and the Azure-side storage relationship supporting OpenAI and Microsoft AI. My part was product and infrastructure work underneath the models: checkpointing, model-artifact distribution, high fan-in and fan-out reads, namespace and account scale, replication, durability, capacity, and reliability. My team translated workload needs that pushed cloud limits into a roadmap and operating mechanisms the service could deliver.
OpenAI’s 2019 report Dota 2 with Large Scale Deep Reinforcement Learning names me under Microsoft Azure Support. Microsoft’s customer story separately describes OpenAI’s exabyte-scale Azure Blob account and 10-terabit-per-second data path.
At SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference in 2024, Jegan Devaraju and I presented a detailed public account of how Azure Blob supported large-scale model training: Scaled Accounts, Blobfuse, hierarchical namespace, checkpoint movement, and a global data path. The capabilities were team outcomes, not mine alone. The part I am proudest of is simple: requirements developed against demanding workloads became public capabilities other customers could use.
I left Microsoft in October 2025 after about twelve and a half years and joined VAST Data as VP of Cloud Product Management. My work now connects VAST’s data architecture to hyperscaler, neocloud, and AI-infrastructure needs, with particular attention to persistent inference, long-context economics, KV cache, and the data layer behind continuously running AI systems.
The details have to survive the translation
My most durable professional skill is translation. I can sit with an engineer inside a distributed-systems failure, then carry the useful truth into a product decision, an executive room, a customer conversation, or a public stage without turning it into theater. The details still have to be right, and the audience should not need a decoder ring.
That work has taken me from a Microsoft Azure IaaS Day session on storage and Kubernetes to SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference, VAST Forward, and theCUBE. In 2025, the Federal Trade Commission played my recorded Microsoft Azure deposition in federal court inFTC v. Meta. I explained how public cloud let startups obtain hyperscale infrastructure without buying the hardware and organization first. The deposition was recorded and then played in court.
I also care about technical ideas landing outside technical rooms. My December 2025 Longmont Museum keynote, From Arithmetic to Abundance, asked what happens when the bottleneck in economic productivity is no longer human labor and talent. I have since brought versions of the conversation to civic audiences in Longmont. The questions there are not only model capability. They are energy, power, work, dignity, governance, and how people find purpose when machines can do more of what once made us economically necessary.
I returned to the program that had kept showing up for me
I returned to “I Have a Dream” first as a volunteer, then a mentor, sponsor, donor, board member, secretary, and eventually Board Chair. I now describe that role as former Board Chair because the current roster names a successor.
The title matters less to me than the responsibility. The kid whose coordinator knocked on the door later had a chance to be accountable for the institution doing that work for other kids. Sponsoring a Dreamer with my family is a fraction of the debt I owe.
Civic work has appeared at several points in my life. At twenty-one, I ran for Longmont City Council in Ward III. I received 1,331 votes, or 28.24 percent, against an incumbent. I lost, but the race taught me how different public responsibility feels from arguing about policy from the sidelines.
In 2025, my wife Emily and I co-founded the Longmont NextWave Initiative to help our community understand AI through education and literacy, economic resilience, and data dignity. We are not selling optimism or fear. We want our town to understand enough to make choices on purpose.
Heritage is not the same thing as relationship
I learned young that the dad raising me was not my biological father; I had been conceived through a sperm donor. Much later, DNA and family-history research identified my biological father. I keep his name and his family private because they declined contact. The public-safe truth is still striking: he had been a decorated fighter pilot who flew hundreds of combat missions in Vietnam, then became an orthopedic surgeon and volunteered his skills for children. Learning about that life gave me language for parts of myself I had never quite placed: the analytical wiring, intensity, restlessness, and need to build.
That is heritage, not relationship. The father who raised me gave me a different inheritance: grit, work, and a clear idea of what showing up did not look like. I measure myself differently. I have never missed one of my son’s band concerts. That small sentence is a complete scoreboard for me.
DNA also brought something joyful. I found a half-sister, Mandy, through 23andMe, and our reunion became a national 23andMe television and customer story in 2016. It was a real connection where none had existed before.
Today my family is the fixed point. Emily is my partner in our community work. My adult son, James, builds Verdify with me. We also have two younger daughters, whose private lives do not need to become content to make the family central to this story.
What is all of this for?
I was a vocal atheist in my twenties, an agnostic through much of my thirties, and at forty-four I find myself more religious than I have ever been. I went to church on Christmas Eve in 2024 for the first time in about thirty years. My faith is not conventional or settled. I wonder whether the intelligence we are building changes how we understand creation, agency, and our own role as creators. An image I made of a humanoid robot kneeling at a cathedral altar remains the shortest version of the question: the created intelligence before its creator, and the person who built the robot inside the same frame.
I am drawn to an abundance thesis: a future where automation can create material plenty, but peace, relationships, communication, understanding, and shared goals decide whether that plenty becomes human flourishing. My largest worry is not a mathematical system spontaneously growing a soul and deciding it hates us. It is powerful systems in the hands of people, and a crisis of meaning for people whose work once told them who they were.
I am also stubbornly rooted in place. I grew up in numbered trailer-park lots and rentals around Boulder County. Decades later, my family bought a historic Longmont home once expanded by developer Ken Pratt, where Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko stayed for three days in 1994. A kid from a trailer-park lot eventually became the caretaker of the house where the Emperor of Japan slept.
I have turned that home into a living systems lab: solar and batteries, thousands of Home Assistant entities, cameras, climate zones, a greenhouse, and the Kubernetes platform underneath it. The house is where my technical life, family life, and attachment to this place all became one system.
Where I am now
I still want the hard problem.
That has been the pattern since the first web page: move toward the unfamiliar system, learn it deeply enough to be useful, and explain what I found. Today that means applied AI, persistent agents, data architecture, inference economics, controls, and the messy work of making systems dependable outside a demo.
I do not know which tool or company will define the next decade. I know the work I want: hard problems, visible consequences, people willing to say what works and what does not, and a future worth explaining.