Different rooms. Same questions.

At NTT I lead International Security Partnerships. The work is reading multi-order risk early enough to do something about it. Five steps of cause and effect from a policy shift in one capital to an exposure half a world away, translated into a posture that a Fortune 100 telecom can carry through a quarter, a year, or a strategic horizon that affects its $80 billion in annual revenue. The deliverable is partner resilience. Shocks land softer when someone reads them five steps back.

The instinct comes from unique rooms: nearly a decade in the U.S. Navy as a Cryptologic Warfare Officer with stops at NSA, U.S. Cyber Command, and the bridge of USS Boxer in the Western Pacific. Then four years on the commercial side learning that customers only return for what you carry into action.

The executives I work with want a partner who has done the operational work, who reads the market and the policy weather and the engineering reality at the same time, and who will tell them the kind truth about which calls still hold after contact with the real world, and which don’t. The outcome is a better position than the one they walked in with.

Bombadil, LLC is the entity I built for the work that does not belong to NTT or Fulcrum or the lectern: fractional CISO engagements, board advisory, signature programs for executive teams that need someone who has actually run the operations.

Two to four high-touch clients run alongside the anchor at any time. The work is contractually private. The pattern that runs through all of them is that I help leaders who own a security, technology, or product decision they cannot push down the org chart. The outcome is the decision, made well, defensible at the board level.

Most investors price the national security opportunity too narrowly. They look at the weapons system, the procurement cycle, the contract vehicle. The companies that decide whether the capacity actually exists work one layer beneath. America's industrial base sits in the middle of a generational modernization wave, and that layer is where the wave breaks. Building and scaling new systems faster than the adversary is the only enduring competitive advantage the U.S. has left.

As Venture Partner at Fulcrum Venture Group, I evaluate companies operating in that layer: manufacturing and supply chain technologies that expand capacity and pull unit costs down, data lifecycle tools that decide whether a system performs in the moments that count, and the critical-technology sectors that determine how the next decade plays out. I have built one of these companies myself from concept to $1.25 million in first-year revenue, building next-generation computer networks for U.S. special operations that also carried a commercial path. One codebase served one product across two markets that pressed the same engineering in different problem directions for different reasons.

The Capital pillar and the Security pillar work the same arena from different angles. Founders get an evaluator who has done the operational work the technology has to survive. Operational clients get an advisor who knows where the market is moving.

I guest lecture at the U.S. Naval Academy, Penn State, and Georgetown on cybersecurity, AI, and the policy questions that make any of the technical work consequential. The audience changes from semester to semester: undergraduates, graduate students, executive-MBA cohorts. The curriculum holds steady: software security, network defense, offensive operations doctrine, and the strategy frame so foreign to engineering.

I teach because of the moment when a student learns something they did not think they could learn. The change happens in the mind in real time. A way of reading the world clicks into place, and the student feels it happen. A student walks in convinced the subject is not for them, and sometime later sees what it can actually be and how it fits in the world they are about to enter. Curiosity is the most valuable gift anyone ever gave me. Passing it on is the second.

Beyond the lectern, I advise on curriculum, support faculty on research where operational experience is the missing input, and take a small number of independent mentees each year drawn from the Naval Academy alumni pool, the MIT Technology and Policy Program, and Georgetown McDonough. The bar I hold for myself is whether the student leaves curious about something they were not curious about before. If they do, the relationship was worth both of our time.

I keynote conferences, brief boards, and guest on podcasts on national security, cybersecurity, and the dual-use technology question. Audiences usually mix executives, policymakers, and technical leaders. The format ranges from a 20-minute conference keynote to a half-day board working session.

Recent and ongoing platforms include RSA Conference, InfoSec World, CyberWire Daily podcast, T-Minus Space Daily podcast, USNI, Breaking Defense, Via Satellite. The writing at /writing carries a representative sample of the topics I cover live, including A Discipline of Seeing on Substack.

I take a small number of paid speaking engagements per quarter. I reserve a few unpaid slots each year for institutions whose mission earns the time. Use the contact form to start a conversation.