After stint as technocrat, exec takes CTO role at Netezza
After founding Watertown-based Lava-Storm Inc. during the bubble days and subsequently launching the Advanced Systems Lab for Hewlett-Packard, new Netezza Corp. chief technology officer Justin Lindsey got a call from the U.S. government.
But Lindsey wasn't asked to don khaki and move to a foreign land. He was hired as CTO of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which he later parlayed into a position as deputy CIO and CTO of the U.S. Department of Justice.
The move from private-sector computer engineer and entrepreneur to government technocrat was one Lindsey never expected, but it's one he's glad he made.
"If you had asked me then (in the 1990s) if I ever expected to work for the government, I would have said no," said Lindsey. "But it was kind of a 'the country called and I said yes' kind of deal."
The position put Lindsey at the center of a growing technology initiative within the country's government agencies. The experience was exciting, he said, and wasn't exactly what people think.
"I was a little surprised at how complex the problems they are trying to solve are," he said. "I was also surprised -- because the government bureaucracy gets such a bad rap when it comes to this kind of stuff -- how dedicated the people working on the problems are. They are dealing with some very fascinating problems and are working to a very important cause."
Part of Lindsey's job at the DOJ and FBI was tracking new technologies that could help the government's technology charter. Among the companies he tracked, though never hired, was Netezza.
"It's such a small technology world in the Boston area, so I also knew a few people at the company from previous jobs," he said.
Lindsey's roots are in New England, having attended MIT and then in 1993 launching LavaStorm, a maker of back-end transaction-processing technologies for companies such as Monster and the Security and Exchange Commission's Edgar filing system. LavaStorm rode the Internet roller-coaster, raising $55 million in venture capital and employing 180 people before crashing to earth and eventually being recapitalized and sold to U.K. telecommunications billing firm Martin Dawes Systems Inc. for an undisclosed amount.
Lindsey comes to the 215-employee Netezza with a mission to help the company expand the applications for its data-warehouse appliance. The company already has a foothold in the industry, raising $73 million in private funding and boasting a customer list of about 86 different clients, ranging from Amazon.com to the TJX Companies Inc. in Framingham.
But Lindsey thinks the technology, which helps companies aggregate and use large amounts of customer data, has the potential for much more, and it is his task -- and one in which he revels -- to play with the technology and find new places for it.
"The company's tag line is 'The Power to Question Everything,' but the question that drove me here was, if you really had the power to question everything, what would you question?" he said.
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