In March 2026 I gave a keynote at the CISOA Technology Summit in Riverside, California.
CISOA, the Chief Information Systems Officer Association, is the association for technology leadership across California's community college system, and the Technology Summit is its annual gathering. The 2026 summit ran March 9–12 at the Riverside Convention Center and drew 841 attendees, 98 sponsoring companies, and more than 60 educational sessions.
The audience is the people who make infrastructure and technology decisions for a system serving a very large number of students: CIOs and CTOs, technology directors, institutional researchers, and instructional technology staff. These are not organizations that can absorb a bad platform bet. When a decision made in that room goes wrong, the cost lands on students.
My Accidental Journey from California Community College IT to Leading GenAI Programs at Netflix
In this personal and often hilarious talk, I took them on a journey from my early days in California’s community college IT trenches to leading GenAI platform initiatives at Netflix. Along the way, I shared moments of imposter syndrome, unexpected career pivots, and lessons learned from going from being an IT Director at SMCCCD to a Senior Technical Program Manager at Netflix. But this isn’t just my story. It’s a mirror for every IT leader navigating the AI wave. I offered practical, down-to-earth wisdom on how public sector technologists can adapt, lead, and thrive in a GenAI future
Why this one mattered to me
I graduated from the CISOA program in 2018 and it was full circle to come back as the keynote speaker eight years later.
