Thomas LeavittSenior Unix Systems Administrator (SAGE Level IV)
Skip to Cover Letter Short Biography I
co-founded Web
Communications, the world's first self-service web hosting
company, in May of 1994. The business grew rapidly for several
years, eventually building to $3 million in annualized revenue and
10,000 customers. I served as VP of Systems
Operations, building and managing our server infrastructure,
and designing and coding large portions of our self-service website
management system. We sold the business to Verio Communications
(now a unit of Nippon Telephone and Telegraph) for $8 million in
1999. It was a tremedously rewarding experience.
In August of 1999, I co-founded another start-up, now called TargetFirst, Inc. We raised $6 million through two rounds of funding in 2000. I served as Senior Systems Operations manager, designing the back end infrastructure and helping to maintain it. Unfortunately, the company's business model ("get paid to surf the web") depended on Internet banner advertising, the value of which was about 1% of what it was at the time we started the business by 2001. As a result, the business model became non-functional, and after a brief attempt to re-purpose our assets and re-work the business model, the company was put into hibernation mode so that the founders could move on to the next big thing. This experience taught me a lot (perhaps even more than my first, successful business), and left me much older and wiser than when I started. In July of 2001, I married Gunilla (see picture above), and after taking some time off, and various experiments, on March 16th, 2004, we incorporated our web design and hosting business as Godmoma's Forge, LLC. Gunilla started designing web sites in 1994 (when I started hosting them), and we'd been pursuing business in this area, in a less focused fashion, for quite a while (as my resume indicates), so it seemed logical to formalize things (incorporation, business license, fictitious business name statement, EIN, etc.). In addition to my primary role as an IT Services consultant (systems and networking) for a variety of companies in Silicon Valley and Santa Cruz, I handle the business end of things, manage our in-house web hosting environment, and do custom implementations of open source applications for our clients. Our offices are currently located at 916 Soquel Ave., #B, in sunny Santa Cruz, CA. We offer high quality, low cost web and graphic design. Give us a call, and see what we can do for you. Cover LetterI am a Senior Linux / Unix Systems administrator (SAGE Level IV) with fifteen-plus years of experience in diverse set of complex, cross-platform environments, including consumer-facing 24/7 production environments ranked in the top 500 by Media Metrix and PC Data. I'm currently engaged as a part-time consultant for a variety of companies in Silicon Valley. I have dealt with every phase of systems management and integration, from specification, to negotiating purchases, to builds and installs, configuration, and ongoing monitoring, maintenance and upgrades. I've managed large scale/high transaction rate email, DNS/Bind, http/s and Sybase RDBMS systems running on Solaris, HPUX, Linux, and FreeBSD, configured networks, and implemented detailed reporting and monitoring systems, using FOSS solutions such as Xymon and Hyperic, and custom written code in Perl and SQL. I have managed systems that required 24/7/365 availability, including a web hosting service (WebCom) and a consumer facing online service (ClickDough), where in both cases a single outage meant thousands of dollars in lost revenue and customer good will and have spent endless hours on the phone with vendor technical support, tracking down and resolving network issues, software bugs, hardware failures and security issues. As an IT Services consultant for most of the last decade, I've worked closely with senior decision makers at every company and organization to modernize their systems and implement core IT infrastructure upgrades such as implementation of network attached storage, network monitoring and virtualization, as well as deploying FOSS and closed-source solutions at the application and server operating system level, for both consumer facing as well as internal usage (often software development and Q/A). As Senior Systems Operations manager for TargetFirst, I designed and oversaw the construction of a robust and highly scalable system architecture, servicing hundreds of thousands of end-users, and then transferred the core elements to a low cost/low maintenance architecture (at 10% of the previous cost) when the company downscaled to accomodate a vastly changed business environment. At WebCom (among other projects requiring thousands of lines of code), I wrote a series of daily, weekly and monthly reports (using Perl and SQL queries against our Sybase database) that analyzed and highlighted important business and systems metrics. This allowed management to feel the pulse of business operations on a daily basis and quickly identify any changing trends. These reports also served to highlight any anomalous situations - in one instance, I noticed that a significant number of "active" customers had not had a payment credited to their account in several months; a few SQL queries served to confirm that a database programmer had failed to re-initialize a trigger after modifying and reloading a table. I corrected the situation and prevented a much larger issue from developing. As VP of Systems Operations for WebCom, I executed several wholesale migrations from one architecture to another as we grew, moving from HPUX on an PA-RISC 9000/835 with internal hard drives, to Solaris on a Sun Sparc 1000E with a Sun SparcStorage Array running Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) with software based RAID, and from there to an Enterprise 4001 and an RSM Storage Array running Veritas Volume Manager that utilized the Veritas File System for greater speed and uptime (bye bye "fsck", hello journaling filesystems with hash-based indexes). I also moved our database from SQL Server on NT4, to Sybase on HPUX 9, and then to Solaris 2.6 on a Sun S1000E - all with near zero downtime; on top of that, I executed several in place upgrades of our Sybase RDBMS server (Sybase 10.x was a bug-ridden disaster requiring constant babysitting). On top of all this, since these were both start ups, I was the primary source of support for the internal end-user systems both companies, diagnosing hardware, software and networking issues. This has also been a common supplementary requirement for my IT Services consulting clients as well. If there is something technical that needs to be dealt with - network, phone, wiring, PCs, office equipment, I'm ready and willing get the job done. If you're looking for someone who can tackle almost any technological project with aplomb, is comfortable being given only the most general direction to come up with a solution, and is capable of handling the entire process, from defining the problem, to specifying a solution, to identifying the product(s) and negotiating with the vendor(s), to working out the financing, to unpacking, installing, and configuring the equipment and software, I'm your man. Thank you for your time and attention, and I look forward to hearing from you. Regards, Resume
Also see my LinkedIn profile. SummarySenior Systems Administrator (SAGE Level IV) with fifteen plus years of experience in a diverse set of complex, cross-platform environments, including consumer-facing 24/7 production environments ranked in the top 500 by Media Metrix and PC Data. Recent Experience2000 - Present Godmoma's Forge, LLC Santa Cruz, CA Manage web site design and IT services business, and provide Linux/Unix, Windows, and network support services to a variety of businesses, organizations and professionals. Task split: 75% technical/25% management and other Current IT Services clients:
Recent clients (sampling):
Have worked as a sub-contractor for the following outsource firms and companies: U'Name IT Solutions, Inc. (2008/09), AboutScan, LLC (2007/08), and Single Point of Contact (2007/08), Serengeti Systems (2006 to present), Stratos Systems (2005/6) 1999–2002 TargetFirst, Inc. San Mateo, CA Internet Advertising Company pioneered the C2B (Consumer to Business) market by developing technologies and methods that allow delivery of highly targeted marketing messages to opt-in consumers via the Internet – PC Data Top 500 company. Task split: 75% technical/25% management
1994–1999 Web Communications, LLC Santa Cruz, CA Pioneered and defined business model for Self-service Web Hosting segment in 1994 – Media Metrix Top 500 Internet property. Task split: 75% technical/25% management
Education1993–1994, 2004–Present Cabrillo College Aptos,
CA
1990–1992 Occidental College Eagle Rock, CA
Skills
Other Activities
Contact InformationThomas LeavittP.O. Box 7095 Santa Cruz, CA 95061-7095 831-295-3917 (cell) thomas@thomasleavitt.org |