Eric is the Head of Organizational Strategy at Underline, focused on execution strategy. He has varied experience building scalable operations and high-performing teams through hyper growth business cycles.

Eric started his career at Silicon Valley Bank working with early-stage tech companies and quickly transitioned to venture capital/private equity services, driving portfolio growth of more than 100% year-over-year for 6 years straight. From there, he moved to a CFO/COO role at Kapost, a marketing SaaS technology company, where he restructured the finance, operations, and HR functions to support a successful sale of the business to Upland Software (NASDAQ: UPLD) within 2 years. Since the sale in 2019, Eric has worked with various other early-to-mid stage businesses on alignment, scale, and tangible results (one of which grew revenue more than 14x during his 2 year tenure).

Eric has a BS in Business Administration with emphasis in finance, a certificate in entrepreneurial studies, and a minor in economics from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Tiffany Kretler is the Senior Controller for Finance at Underline. She started her career at Deloitte focused on external audit for the private and public sector, then she was headhunted to join Toyota Financial Services to complete or lead international and domestic internal audits. At ARYZTA, a global food manufacturer, she was the subject matter expert for the Americas region in all things internal audit and internal controls; she synergized three companies’ policies into one standard operation procedure program for finance and operation functions and poise the region for long-term growth. When she joined the SunPower team, she led an outsourced accounting team to grow a commercial asset portfolio from 80 to 110+ assets. Tiffany has sharpened her experience developing and testing financial controls, operational controls, and internal policies and has been trained in auditing, preparing, and reporting financial statements, in both an internal and external role. Tiffany graduated with honors at Indiana University with a BS in Accounting, BS in Operations Management and a minor in Spanish. She is passionate about leading teams, initiatives, and projects in her professional and personal life.

Mark Kropilak serves as General Counsel for Underline. Mark is an attorney and business leader with vast experience in the areas of infrastructure investments, acquisitions, technology commercialization, and utility valuation. He has served as General Counsel and SVP of Business Development for large regulated utilities engaged in the water and wastewater profession. Mark spent over 20 years with Aqua America where he completed over 200 acquisitions and growth ventures, establishing the platform for investing over $2 Billion, growing the company from 250,000 customers to over 950,000 customers. Prior to Aqua, Mark was associated with Morgan Lewis and subsequently served as Of Counsel for Saul Ewing working on various regulatory matters. Mark has also served as CEO of a start-up water treatment company and has been a Board advisor to other technology companies engaged in water quality measurement and cloud-based applications for plant operators. Mark holds a law degree from Columbia University, an EMBA from Villanova University and undergraduate degrees in Economics and Accounting from Saint Vincent College.

Bob Thompson is the Founder & CEO of Underline, a venture-backed company focused on deploying intelligent infrastructure for U.S. communities.

Prior to founding Underline, Bob served as SVP & Head of Corporate Finance Solutions for Guardian Life, where his mandate ranged from Treasury & Liquidity Risk Management, to Capital Markets Strategy and Balance Sheet Optimization, Corporate Development, M&A, and Strategic Investments. During his tenure with Guardian, Bob led a number of strategic initiatives, including serving as Chairman and President of Guardian Investor Services and Guardian Strategic Ventures.

Over the years, Bob has led multiple efforts including acting as Head of Capital Markets for a boutique insurance bank and Group Head of the Special Transactions Group at CIBC World Markets, working with the UBS Global Structured Products Group, and executing various first-of-their-kind derivative/concentrated risk transactions. In 2009, Bob and his wife founded One Life Missions, operating in the U.S. and internationally; as a result, Bob has worked in various missions and relief capacities in the U.S., Haiti, and Guatemala.

Bob attended Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, earning a Bachelors in Science of Foreign Service.

John Laureda is the Procurement and Inventory Manager at Underline. A native of Kissimmee, Florida, he has 21 years of life cycle logistics experience while serving his country in the United States Navy. He has received specialized training in developing, implementing, and sustaining tailored life cycle product support that optimizes affordability, material readiness, and joint warfighter requirements—providing the nation with an enduring strategic advantage over its adversaries.

As Underline's National Director of Construction, Tom has a 30-year career in the telecom industry. With experience in engineering, construction, and implementation services, Tom has overseen the construction of tens of thousands of plant miles associated with fiber-to-the-home projects deployed across all regions of North America.

Before joining Underline, Tom was Vice President of NX Utilities, a subsidiary of QualTek—a turnkey provider of infrastructure services to the telecommunications industries—where he built and directed teams of more than 500 people.

Before QualTek, Tom served as Vice President of Operations for Bay Networks, Inc, where he oversaw a call center and field operations that provided installation for more than 3000 buried fiber-optic service wires weekly.

Lance Addison leads Underline’s national and local fiber network Engineering, Construction, and Operations. He has more than 25 years of Wireline and Wireless industry experience in a variety of Operational, Financial, Construction, EHS, Logistics, and Employee Development support disciplines. Lance has been involved in building more than 30,000 route miles of fiber. Most recently, Lance was the Director of Telecom Operations for a Quanta Services business unit. Quanta is the nation’s largest publicly held (NYSE: PWR) Infrastructure Services Contractor with annual revenues exceeding $11B.

Over the past two decades, Lance has held senior management positions on both the Network Owner and Network Contractor segments of Wireline/Wireless industry including President/COO of Bear Communications, where he led a team of 1000 people building the business from $50M to $200M in revenue, and Vice President of UniTek Global Services, a preeminent Engineering, Procurement, and Construction (EPC) firm that focuses on large FTTP/x construction builds. Preceding network owner leadership roles include Charter Communications—the second largest cable provider and competitive local access providers Everest Connections (now Consolidated Communications) and McLeodUSA.

Kyle Glaeser is the Director of Emerging Networks at Underline. He started his career as a network design engineer working on projects for Google Fiber, AT&T, Verizon, and FTTH builds around the world. Using his background in GIS, Kyle created scripts and models to drive efficiencies into network designs, shaving millions of dollars off large builds. He began implementing GIS based innovations into the design, construction, and financing of large FTTH builds. After seeing a number of projects explode past their projected budgets, he created a program to use LiDAR collection data and autodesign tools to accurately analyze a market’s cost before construction. Through this work, Kyle took an interest in information infrastructure as the basis of smart city technologies, developing network architectures that are custom tailored to communities infrastructure needs. Upon learning about the emerging open access market and software defined networking, he became passionate about developing specific network use cases and architectures that would propel the open access model forward as the network of the future.

Jason White leads Engineering at Underline. For more than 30 years, Jason has provided thought leadership, guided cultural change, and applied his technological expertise to industries ranging from biotechnology and healthcare IT, to food processing, documentation management, digital wellness, and blockchain. Jason has repeatedly built innovative teams that pragmatically challenge the status quo, and has guided those teams to success. His previous major deployments have been in biotechnology and healthcare IT, in which he grew large teams of full-time employees, managed multi-million dollar budgets and helped close acquisitions and exit events by demonstrating technological excellence. Jason connects the dots between business vision, organizational structure, and technology strategy.

Ryan Korte has spent 30 years developing and managing advanced fiber-optic network and systems architecture for Fortune 500 enterprise companies and nationwide telecommunications carriers.

At Underline, Ryan will lead the Cloud & Network Ops, Dev Ops, and Security Ops teams. He will work to scale the network infrastructure and related systems as Underline adds new services and expands to new communities, all the while ensuring an excellent client experience. Ryan will also oversee all connectivity, and interconnectivity, to Underline’s service provider partners.

Prior to Underline, Ryan was with Lumen for more than 23 years and was responsible for several technology and strategy teams across the core Lumen internet, media and optical networks.  Most recently Ryan led the Lumen Cloud Connect product and Network as a Service (NaaS) initiatives. Prior to Lumen he was at MasterCard International, where he developed the strategic direction and technology for the global transaction networks.

Ryan is a former board member of the Video Services Forum which is an international association dedicated to interoperability, quality metrics, and education for video network technologies. He also served on the board of the Streaming Video Alliance which is a global consortium of organizations dedicated to helping shape the future of streaming video through industry collaboration. Hehas a bachelor of science in electrical engineering from Kansas State University and a master’s in business administration from Maryville University.

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Michael Gomez is a Senior Network Engineer at Underline. He brings over 17 years of experience in Information Technology across multiple industry segments. He got his start working for the City of Tucson, supporting core infrastructure such as public safety critical systems. Further experience includes network infrastructure roles in the Bay Area working for Autodesk, and in Arizona as a consultant providing scalable solutions to private businesses and public institutions countrywide.

Prior to joining Underline, Michael spearheaded the IT infrastructure roadmap for a fast-growing startup focusing on AI-driven autonomous class 8 long haul trucks. He assembled and led a team tackling novel technical challenges for a cutting-edge industry. Michael has a passion for network technologies and building collaborative team environments.

John is a Cloud Infrastructure Engineer at Underline. Prior to working at Underline, John was one of the engineers who developed Bank of America's private cloud, worked on HP's OpenStack project, and was one of the first employees at BMC's server automation division. John was one of T-Mobile's original engineers and contributed to their rapid growth. In his spare time, John enjoys spending time with his wife and kids in Nevada, where he lives.

Therese Same is a DevOps Engineer at Underline where she is focused on Cloud Architecture to improve organizational infrastructure. As a Cloud Solutions Architect and Security Engineer, Therese has more than 5 years of experience in networking and operating deployments, and designing, provisioning, and managing highly available, fault-tolerant and scalable infrastructures. Therese has designed and improved organization infrastructure by integrating cutting-edge technology to improve cloud security, monitoring, governance & compliance, as well as application delivery and data protection.

Kinan Shahid is the Head of Cloud Strategy & Network Operations at Underline. He has more than 20 years of experience leading data-driven innovation to drive business transformation, and the design and deployment of large and small-scale service providers globally. Before joining Underline, Kinan spent more than 3 years at C-Spire where he was a C-level advisor for all telecom businesses, setting 3-5 year technical and organizational strategies roadmaps for the multi-service. While at C-Spire, Kinan also architected and redesigned the State of Mississippi’s infrastructure to meet future needs. Kinan has proven success in the areas of strategy, architecture, business impacts, commercial value, budget planning, and developing end-to-end solutions. He is a hands-on leader with a passion for innovating technologies, focused on delivering competitively superior technology solutions to the business while growing people in the organization and creating high-performance and effective teams. Kinan is an entrepreneurial and visionary leader, fostering a team culture that is passionate and collaborative and drives innovation and strategic impact. He has a bachelor's and a master's degree in Information Technology.

Jason Thibodeau is the Senior DevOps Engineer at Underline. His background includes managing on-prem as well as cloud infrastructure for multiple large organizations including Tripadvisor, CVS/Health, and j2 Global. He brings a wealth of experience in infrastructure management, automation, and systems design to the group. Jason specializes in removing unneeded complexity and distilling systems to their minimum-necessary complexity, while maintaining or enhancing functionality. His deep knowledge and experience managing diverse systems gives him the type of intuition needed to build innovative, stable, and performant systems that integrate the latest technologies without compromising their integrity.

Harikrishna Rajagopalan is the Senior Network Engineer at Underline. After graduating with a Masters in Telecommunications, Hari started his career as a Voice and Telecommunications Engineer setting up Call Center Technology. Working as a Network Engineer at AT&T and GE, he gained competence in both Service provider and Data Center Networking.

He was the sole Network Engineer at Drew Marine managing more than 70 locations connected via MPLS technology. At Interactive Data, part of NYSE today, he helped design and maintain a world wide network which specialized in market data and ultra low latency networks.

At Dell Technologies, he was a member of a global team of Network experts which dealt with highly escalated and complicated issues of Enterprise and Data Center Network Technologies.

Throughout his career, he built and designed network infrastructure which was cutting edge as well as practical and is continuing the same at Underline.

Kristen Gliniecki is a Cybersecurity Analyst at Underline. She graduated with honors from Baker College with a BS in Information Technology & Security, and a minor in Information Assurance. She has 12 years of experience in information technology with seven years specializing in cybersecurity in the defense industrial base. Her areas of expertise include vulnerability management, endpoint protection, security operations, incident response, security auditing, risk assessment, certification & accreditation, policy development, process optimization, compliance reporting, configuration management, and server administration.

Roy Coleman is a Senior Security Operations Engineer at Underline. He has more than 19 years of experience with modern information technology and tools across various industries and platforms. His background includes work with financial extranets, telecommunications service providers, the defense industrial base, and software development companies. As a career contractor, Roy has worked for companies including Raytheon and General Dynamics, in roles that include leading task orders for the Information Technology Directorate, and managing information assurance and certification efforts for federal agencies. He has been recognized for his leadership in cybersecurity on defense and national security related projects. Roy’s experience with Open Source has led him to specialize in integrating effective security solutions with operations on limited budgets.

Mia Komel is a Sr. Product Manager with more than 10 years of experience building products in startups as well as big companies. During her career she had the opportunity to work on B2B / B2C, marketplaces, and e-commerce products.

Her experience allows her to work tightly with engineering teams and engage various different types of stakeholders. Mia is obsessed with understanding user needs and pain points and looks at product simplicity and short cycles as a way to build products that users love.  She won a top award for innovation in Brazil prior to migrating to Silicon Valley.

Mia is experienced in agile methodologies and applying lean manufacturing strategies into product management to product / market fit.  She firmly believes that organizations that are able to understand and deliver products that balance user needs with long term technological viability tend to become leaders in their markets.

On any given weekend you will find her either playing with her modular synthesizers, listening to her growing vinyl collection or taking photos with her 4x5 wooden camera.

Ann Reck is the Senior Brand Designer at Underline. She has previously worked at many of the leading advertising agencies, and most recently helped grow the design department at a health and fitness startup. With more than 10 years of creative professional experience, she has a background in Design, Production, Art Direction, and Illustration. Ann uses these skills to create brand consistency through design and communications from start to finish.

Although born in Virginia, she has lived in Colorado, Boston, and now Philadelphia. Her passions consist of supporting Philly Sports, working out at her CrossFit gym, and collecting sneakers.

Christina Lynn is the Senior Product Designer at Underline. Her background as a technologist started as a technical writer for software and office infrastructure to support 11,000 retail offices, robotic process automation to handle technical support center reporting, and designing mobile platforms for users in a retail environment at 80,000 desks.

After moving into a role as a principal designer for an insurance distributor and healthcare services company, Christina implemented a new design library to advance the development of shared components for customer relationship management and clinical pharmacy tools. This enabled her team to introduce rapid prototyping into the intake and design process, which provided both business stakeholder and software engineers with essential interface references. Her experiences have given her the ability to creatively navigate technical limitations and articulate both complex and simple concepts into holistic and meaningful user experiences.

She strongly believes in dedicating talent toward initiatives that have a lasting and positive impact on communities.

Coty Beasley is the Head of Product and Design at Underline. His background combines Product Design, Product Management, and Computer Science to create software experiences that are usable, intuitive, and communicative.

A veteran of early-stage technology ventures, Coty has been a founding member of multiple startups, developing new technologies and industry-firsts. These experiences have exposed him to complex work in artificial intelligence, healthcare outcomes, medical devices, telecommunications, civic tech, fintech, robotics, and physiology.

After living in the Bay and braving the Austin heat for many years, he now lives in the Midwest with his wife, four cats, and a shollie. At any time, you can find him restoring vintage audiovisual equipment, growing vertical hydroponic gardens, or thumbing through an extensive vinyl collection.

Marc is a Senior Software Engineer at Underline. He started his professional software journey while growing up in Canada, graduating with a Computer Science degree and working for a variety of industries and customers. Most recently, Marc helped make the internet faster, safer and more reliable at Cloudflare.

In his spare time, you'll find him wrenching on a 1970s SUV or "shredding" mountain bike trails. Marc enjoys volunteering for local trail organizations to help connect communities to nature through responsible outdoor recreation.

Bradley Hilton is a Senior Software Engineer at Underline and has more than eleven years of experience in software development. Prior to Underline, Bradley worked as an Interconnectivity Architect at Rocket.Chat with a focus on tools to enable businesses and communities to interconnect their various other communication tools. While at Rocket.Chat, he created the App Engine and the App Marketplace to distribute Rocket.Chat Apps. Bradley enjoys working with real estate and has built several solutions for helping manage it, including writing software to help manage owner finance loans. Bradley is passionate about family, faith, and spending time outdoors while hiking or mountain biking.

Gene Armstrong is a Senior Software Engineer at Underline and has more than ten years of experience in software development. Over his career, Gene has worked in many aspects of technology including networking, system administration, support, as well as back-end and front-end development. His experience in these areas has equipped him with the knowledge to build efficient and innovative software solutions focussed on positive user experiences.

Casey O'Kelly is a Senior Backend Engineer at Underline. Before working at Underline, Casey worked as a Full Stack Developer at Renaissance Learning (formerly Illuminate Education). With Renaissance, he supported a suite of products being used by more than 15 million students across 5,200 school districts. Specializing in backend services, he built and maintained tools that enabled teachers to test students and target areas of growth.

Casey is passionate about spending quality time with his family, programming advancements, and watching sports.

Eugene Yakhnenko is a Senior Frontend Software Engineer at Underline. He has more than ten years of experience in building web interactive content. Previously worked on an applicant recruiting platform with 100K new monthly users and a POS for event tickets with 10M yearly cash flow. His background includes work with point of sale software, content management systems, event scheduling, and candidate evaluation platforms. His experience has shaped his passion for clean, intuitive, and accessible user interfaces that help users fulfill their goals seamlessly. Eugene enjoys making life easier for the web user, crafting programming language interpreters and learning how complex systems function.

Thomas Esposito is a Software Engineer at Underline focusing on API and Integration execution. He has 6 years of experience at companies ranging from startups to AT&T. Thomas has worked with a variety of technology environments in a full stack capacity, building both backend services and frontend components to consume them. His experiences have shaped his passions for system integration and information infrastructure.

Josemar has more than ten years of experience building software and worked in every aspect of software development from ideas to architecture to Backend APIs and Frontend User Experiences. His expertise in all these areas gives him the perfect knowledge about what is required to build efficient, scalable, maintainable software platforms.

Previously to Underline, Josemar worked as Principal Software Engineer at Neighborly, working on financial services tools to create community demand for projects. In the past, Josemar helped build the first open-source crowdfunding platform for creative projects. Today, it is the biggest crowdfunding platform in South America.

Josemar is passionate about open source software; and believes that shared solutions are the foundation for efficiently building the next generation of software services while elevating the quality of the projects.

Before joining Underline, Deni led Analytics at UpTogether, consulted and taught data science for several social impact initiatives, and produced research to understand what works for social policy. Her interests include combining causal inference and machine learning techniques and applying new methods to solve real world problems. Deni is passionate about information access and seeing communities thrive.

Nashwa Khalid is the Data Analyst at Underline. Passionate about data-driven decision making to maximize impact, she joined Underline after an extensive career in global health. Nashwa has successfully implemented evidence-based interventions to bridge health delivery gaps in Ghana, Pakistan, and the USA. Nashwa received her Master’s degree from The Fletcher School, Tufts University where her research focused on the nexus between foreign direct investment and entrepreneurship-led development in emerging economies.

Before joining Underline as a data scientist, Will served in a variety of machine learning and analytics roles applying cutting edge techniques to real world problems in business and government. He began his data career at Uber as an analyst embedded with the Applied Machine Learning and Data Operations platform teams, prior to joining the Marketplace Personalization team. He then served as a data fellow with Delta Analytics and worked in conjunction with IDEO.org to develop a modeling approach to analyze housing outcomes for city government financial counseling recipients. He also founded the Deep Sheep Project, where he developed a neural network-based computer vision system to automatically classify wildlife images for the California Department of Fish & Wildlife. He did his graduate study in applied & computational mathematics at Johns Hopkins University, where his research focused on new methods for causal inference techniques for time series data.

Rahul Aggarwal is Head of Capital Markets at Underline. He has 25 years of experience in a variety of corporate finance, structured finance, investment-related and entrepreneurial roles. Prior to Underline, Rahul was a Managing Director at the Guardian Life Insurance Company of America, where he helped form Corporate Finance Solutions, which served as an internal investment bank, consulting organization and strategic investment unit (including funding for the company and corporate venture capital). Rahul started his career in corporate finance at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, then transitioned to venture capital/private equity at Frontenac Company and thereafter, fixed income structured finance sales and trading at UBS. Rahul also helped start a pioneering software as a service (SaaS) technology company in the San Francisco-bay area in the late 1990s, and also worked at two start-up insurance-related specialty finance companies in New York City. Rahul has an AB in Mathematics and Economics, AM in Economics and MBA, all from The University of Chicago.

Suzanne Heritage is Director of Community Partnerships & Policy at Underline, where she works hand in hand with communities to support their connectivity goals. Passionate about building—and amplifying—the conditions where communities can thrive, Suzanne has centered her career around cultivating partnerships that pair organizational growth with positive community impact.

Prior to joining Underline, Suzanne worked for findhelp, a social care technology start up, where she led business development and go-to-market strategy, generating and expanding partnerships with key industry stakeholders and state government markets. In this role she synthesized federal and state policy to inform business and product strategy, working closely with prospective clients to understand needs, identify and carve out opportunities, and foster and maintain strategic relationships centered on trust.

Suzanne attended The University of Texas at Austin, earning a Master of Science in Social Work.

Christine Marlowe is the Community Engagement Manager at Underline. Passionate about connecting with the very people who live, work and socialize in specific communities, who make each so unique, Christine has had the pleasure of working closely with numerous constituencies while representing all levels of government– at the federal, state and local levels. Previously, Christine worked for the Democratic Leader, U.S. Senator Charles E. Schumer, as well as represented numerous NYC and NYS agencies for various infrastructure projects. She has experience developing and implementing brand messaging and strategic communication plans, in addition to dynamic public outreach strategies and community engagement events. Christine attended The University at Albany and earned her Master of Arts degree in Organizational Communication.

Jaime Espinosa is the Director of Industry Partnerships & Supply Chain Management at Underline. He has over 20 years of experience in Sales, Account Management, Project Management, Market Development, Consulting and Engineering. He has experience managing sales growth and experience with multi-channel distribution and account strategy domestically and internationally with multi-million dollar and long term revenue accounts. He started his career as a Project Manager with General Electric performing technical analysis, sales support, project viability, and supervising the refurbishment of power generation plants using PC-based supervision software SCADA, and PLC-based automation. From General Electric he went to Corning Optical Communications where he held different roles over 15 years: Field Engineer and Project Manager, Systems Engineer responsible for the Latin American markets, National Broadband Stimulus Account Manager responsible for a network of business associates and recipients of federal funding for broadband infrastructure projects, Manager for National Contractors, and Manager for Market and Business Development for Carrier Networks where he created the business strategy for Municipalities, Electric Membership Cooperatives and Rural Electric Cooperatives, and the next generation of FTTx projects in the Americas.

Eva Arevuo leads marketing and communications for Underline. Eva is an experienced communications strategist, with a passion for social impact ventures, civic tech, and urban innovation.

Before joining Underline, Eva led marketing and communications for Neighborly, managed a team of six as the Innovation Team Director at Small Girls PR, working on clients like GE, and ran corporate and executive communications at Change.org. Eva has also consulted on brand, policy, communications, and product marketing for a number of startups, investment firms, and advocacy groups. She has deep experience with brand positioning, strategic partnerships, executive thought leadership, content strategy and creation, and coordinated grassroots marketing campaigns.

Taking central communications roles, Eva has developed core branding and big ideas—from the power of business to scale social impact, to the role of city leaders to deliver opportunity to residents, and the impact of open access fiber networks to transform communities across the U.S. Eva was born and raised in London, and has a BA from the University of Oxford and Princeton University.