MobileIron

When I was the CEO of Airspace, I hired Bob to run business development, and he did a phenomenal job as head of business development at Airspace.

And then later when I incubated MobileIron and, uh, I, I hired the first two co-founders, then I hired Bob to be the CEO.

So he was the, the third co-founder and CEO of MobileIron.

So we worked for a long time on these two companies.

Yeah, so in 2005, Cisco bought Airspace, and I spent three years at Cisco, but I always wanted to be a CEO.

When I looked at what they were working on, I had this, "Oh my God, I gotta go do this." And so I left Cisco.

I actually left a decent amount of money on the table at Cisco to leave at that point.

I just had to do MobileIron.

I am a multi-time entrepreneur.

Probably the one I'm most well-known for is being the founding CEO of a company called MobileIron, which we started in 2008 and grew from zero to $150 million of ARR over the course of five years and took it public on Nasdaq.

So in 2014, we went public.

In 2016, uh, we missed our numbers.

It was really painful.

And as CEO, that responsibility was on me.

In that board meeting, I said, "Hey, one of the things we should talk about is whether I should be the CEO of MobileIron going forward." And then probably 60 days later, Taichi came back to me and said, "You know, remember that conversation we had in the board meeting? We're gonna take you up on that."

Bob is so gifted, he can compensate for a lot of people, and he was doing a lot himself.

On the professional side, my key achievements, some were successes, some were failures, like a lot of entrepreneurs.

Probably the one I'm most well-known for is being the founding CEO of a company called MobileIron, which we started in 2008 and grew from zero to $150 million of ARR over the course of five years and took it public on NASDAQ.

Prior to that, I started a company, or was part of the founding team at a company called Airspace, which was also a success.

We sold that to Cisco for 500 million in 2005.

Well, that's great, and you mentioned some of those companies that you worked for.

I mean, you also worked for T-Mobile and, and MobileIron.

Talk to me a little bit more about the things that you learned in those roles and just your, your journey with those companies and, again, how that ties so directly into the golf industry, and I would think that you were working with a lot of golfers even with those companies.

Absolutely.

They're complex.

So that was, you know, a lot of organizational work and a lot of strategic thinking, a lot of dealing with executives, a lot of working your network.

And on the other side of things, for example, at MobileIron or Dropbox or VMware, I was in the business development role.

And the, the, th- to kind of summarize the work I was doing there, it really was working with partners or potential partners to create something where the combination of the two parts was better than the two parts being independent of each other.

And it was a very easy transition to come into Avanti and try to help the team solve at the time in 2022 was integrating all of the acquisitions that were done over the past two years.

Companies like MobileIron, Sherwell, Pulse Secure, and RiskSense.

Yeah.

And one thing very interesting I found running through the announcements that Avanti has done in 2026 is that you keep saying you're embedding AI directly into the workflows that customers rely on every day, right? This sounds like a product and productized service line, but I felt like you meant something bigger in terms of the overall impact.