A CTO 4 You
John Gwinner's ResumeI’ve been leading Technology and Teams for over twenty years.
I solve problems via people, technology, and code.
Let’s get together and solve your problems.
Chief Technology Officer to Senior Director
Technical Leader | 0-1 Innovator | Product Development | Startup Specialist
Managing developers is like “herding cats” only if you don’t speak the language. I do.
A results-driven CTO & technology executive with 15+ years of experience scaling startups, leading global teams, and driving $75M+ in revenue growth. Proven track record in technical leadership, product innovation, and strategic growth for companies from Series A startups to Fortune 500 enterprises. Adept at turning around failing products, reducing costs by millions, and managing global engineering teams (50+ direct reports, 75+ offshore resources).
I still stay hands on to work with hard core developers, DBAs, IT specialists, and customers.
- Scaling teams & operations (3 to 80+ direct reports, 16 to 350 company size)
- SaaS, Retail Software Development, and Enterprise Software
- Product Strategy & Roadmaps
- Cloud & DevOps Leadership
- AI, Metaverse & Web3 Innovation
- Driving M&A and Exits (Past Companies Acquired by Accenture)
- Veteran: worked as ACIO and CIO; 16K and 4K Marines, Billions of CapEx. and CISO for all Marine Corps Logistics.
Key Career Highlights
- Developed product strategy and AI roadmap for PoC for investment board for Series “B” – Enact Systems
- Turned around a failing SaaS product to a high-performance, scalable solution—resulted in zero technical issues post-launch (CEO Verified) – Enact Systems
- Instrumental in Series “B” funding – Cover Technologies
- Scaled a startup from 16 to 350 employees (technical team grew from 3 to 80) → Acquired by Accenture – DAZ Systems
- Saved $10M+ in licensing costs by implementing open-source performance monitoring serving 40 businesses with 10K+ users – C3 Business Solutions
- Saved a $2M retail software project for Solar Turbines, Division of Caterpillar, $15M of follow on services – DAZ Systems
- Built an offshore office generating $80M+ in services revenue and managed onshore software development budgets of $25M+
Experience
Enact Systems, Inc | CTO / Chief Architect | Sep 2023 - April 2025 |
| Hired as Chief Architect; promoted within weeks to Head of Engineering, replacing the CTO. Turned around a failing SaaS product to a market leading application. | ||
- Transformed an unsellable SaaS product into a high-performance solution with zero technical issues
- Developed AI strategy and roadmap for investors and post MVP
- Led a 40+ person engineering team (primarily in India)
- Spearheaded AI strategy & development roadmap for investment
- Implemented a GDPR compliance solution & passed an external audit
- Architected billing automation that reduced manual efforts and increased revenue capture
DWorld VR | Fractional CTO | Feb 2021 - Sep 2024 |
Cover Technologies, Inc | Staff Software Engineer | Mar 2021 - Feb 2023 |
| Traditional job during gap in fractional work during COVID | ||
FastCTO | Fractional CTO | 2019 - 2021 |
| Fractional CTO work for startups, through FastCTO.Com. Two major projects/clients; Squip.com and Trio Supply Chain Solutions. | ||
Care Labs Healthcare | Startup CTO | 2018 - 2020 |
| Designed architecture for a medical product for childhood epilepsy and sleep apnea; advised CEO, built a team, delivered milestones on time. On track, but disbanded during COVID due to founder working during Pandemic | ||
- Designed and developed a HIPAA-compliant medical device for epilepsy and sleep apnea detection on AWS.
- Built and mentored a team of 3 developers, delivering CI/CD pipelines for Raspberry Pi, Angular, and AWS Lambda.
- Developed innovative way to detect limb motion without limbs being visible, via 3D Computer Vision
- Personally 3D Printed over $5K of PPE for COVID-19 relief
C3 Business Solutions, Inc | Chief Technology Officer | 2016 - 2017 |
| Oversaw all technical aspects of C3 Biz; Managed and mentored all (45) employees in programming and technical support departments, established strategic technical roadmap, technical sales strategy, cloud vision and strategy, and project management. | ||
- Customer acquisition for major Oracle AIX to Linux migration (Harbor Freight, 13TB database), and accelerated upgrades by 200%Architected cloud strategies for AWS and Oracle Cloud, driving 50% of new SaaS business.
- New Engineering procedures and standards improved performance, in one case a shipping label from 90 seconds to less than 300ms, 27,000% improvement.
- Mentored 3 recent graduates and expanded the engineering team by 25%
Packt Publishing | Author / Consultant | 2017 - 2017 |
| Published “Getting started with React VR” with Packt Publishing. | ||
- Traditionally published a technical book covering VR / XR
- Developed AR/VR applications for aerospace, art, and events, including SIGGRAPH 2019 VR Theater.
- Created Vuforia mobile apps and SLAM-based AR demos for industry events.
- Earned VR Pioneer title, ACM SIGGRAPH (Association of Computing Machinery, Special Interest Group in Graphics).
DAZ Systems, Inc | Director of Technology | 1998 - 2015 |
| Executive reporting to CEO/President; Managed all technical aspects of the company during growth from 16 people to 350, acquired by Accenture. Initially hired as a Program/Project manager; promoted to Manager of IT Services; then promoted to Director of Technology | ||
- Hired, managed and mentored technical team from 12 to 150, setting coding standards and architecture.
- Developed offshore services team from 1 to 15, and created a services initiative with over $80M of services revenue.
- Architected and implemented a private Cloud; one client company over $10k per month and $1.5 million of licensing.
- As a PM, optimized C++ over 250% speed improvement and reduced CPU load by over 80%. Responsible for > 300,000 lines of code, shipped product in 2 months. Wrote > 2K lines of code in one month
- Managed > 200 technical and software development implementations on time and under budget
CompuServe Information Service, Inc (ISV) | ISV | 1994 - 1998 |
| Independent Software Vendor for CompuServe; built a public prototype of one of the first 3D "Metaverses" | ||
Education
Bachelor’s of Science, Electrical Engineering – Cornell University
- 2 years of master’s level Computer Engineering as an undergrad (all graduate level courses)
- Competitive merit based full academic scholarship.
Writing (Certificate program) (2013) – UCLA Extension
Veteran
Information Systems Management Officer for 4th Marine Aircraft Wing, and Assistant ISMO for the 4th Marine Division. Civilian title would be “CIO”. Organization of over 20,000 personnel in 47 states.
Several major IT projects, completed on time and under budget:
- $13M project to modernize wide area networking
- $1M project to modernize word processing equipment for deployed units
CISO for all Marine Corps logistics/supply chain. Billions of dollars of inventory.
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