About
I've been in tech since the era of dial-up. The thing I love most hasn't changed: helping people ship something real.
I started in the U.S. Air Force in 1995, ran the LAN at the Navy Dive and Salvage Training Center, taught Windows NT at a community college in Panama City, and slowly worked my way from network engineer to developer to development manager to founder. By 2010 I was running the Tampa office of Wolters Kluwer, leading a twenty-person team building healthcare compliance software. That's where Scrum got its hooks in me.
In 2014 I co-founded Clearly Agile. We scaled it to $8M in annual revenue in four years, landed on the Inc. 5000, and trained thousands of professionals in Scrum. I sold half of it in 2019. In 2017 I started Synuma, a B2B SaaS platform that tracked brick-and-mortar location development. We grew it from $0 to $1M ARR with zero debt and sold it to SiteZeus in 2023.
Right now I'm doing fractional leadership for SaaS companies that need a Chief Agile Officer or fractional CTO/CPO, training Scrum through The Braintrust Group as a Certified Scrum Trainer, and building AI products on the side. I am also slowly learning game development on the side because I want to start a real game studio one day. See the games page.
The family
I'm married with two sets of twins. Eli and Eva (boy and girl, born 2018) and Peach and Pepper (identical girls, 2020). Everything I build is, in some way, for them.
The kids also have their own YouTube channel, MastroTwinsTwice, a nod to the two sets of twins.
How I work
Based on my 2020 DISC Plus profile. I find this stuff actually useful for working with people, so I publish it.
- DISC profile
- High S (88) · Med I (60) · Med D (56) · Low C (32). Translation: calm under pressure, results over process, will challenge rules when they get in the way of shipping.
- Top drivers
- Economic (93) and Individualistic (75). I want the work to produce real outcomes, and I want the room to do it my way.
- How to communicate with me
- Talk about goals and outcomes. Put details in writing. Don't legislate. Don't leave decisions hanging. Be direct.
- What I'm bad at
- Saying no. Detail work that isn't high-leverage. Sitting in meetings that should have been a decision.