David Casti

David Casti is a business and technical leader with a long track record of success working with organizations of all sizes.  An owner of several companies, he is personally responsible for the Neosynapse brand, a boutique management and technology consulting team solving big problems for organizations of all kinds.  Neosynapse’s customers include Comcast, Time Warner, Canoe Ventures, the University of Michigan Health System, Linden Lab, by Deluxe, Union Bank and the US departments of Energy, State, and Treasury.

Mr. Casti was a founder of the business Internet pioneer DIGEX Inc. as its first product manager, and operated a profitable business unit before the company’s IPO.  As a Vice President of DIGEX, he oversaw the successful acquisition of DIGEX by Intermedia, where Mr. Casti remained a member of the executive team.  At Intermedia, he focused primarily on scaling customer service capabilities to keep pace with exploding Internet demand of the late 1990s.  Joining Network Access Solutions immediately after its first investment of venture capital, he established a full range of service and delivery functions for DSL products.  For his final year at Network Access Solutions, he served as Chief Marketing Officer where his responsibilities included quality and organizational development in addition to traditional marketing disciplines.

Leaving the telecommunications industry in 2001, Mr. Casti focused his personal efforts on developing custom distributed computing systems for large enterprises:

• His eDV system was one of the largest web sites operated by the US Government that year, garnering more than 10 million daily visitors distributed across more than 20 hosts.
• His ARTHUR system, AOL, boasted the largest Oracle installation on Linux in the world, and quickly became the core data system for real-time information about AOL subscribers.
• His VIVID system, Comcast, captured real-time information on their fast-growing video-on-demand product.  Casti is a patented inventor (US 8,094,661) for his work on this system and its ability to solve real-time network management challenges.
• His Usage Data Mart system, for Time Warner Cable, captured fine-grained subscriber Call Data Records in an extensible structure that allowed Internet and video-on-demand to be merged for a 360º view of subscriber behavior.

In 2010, Mr. Casti joined Canoe Ventures as a management and technology consultant, working on projects spanning six national cable operators, including:

• Establishing the initial Internal Analytics Platform to collect, manage, and report on incoming data for all operators;
• Establishing security policies for all data sources, storage and processing systems to meet industry best-practices and contractual requirements; and
• Evaluating available data sources to create the best composite picture of product performance across all operators.

Mr. Casti continues to solve technology challenges for industries of all kinds.  Recent projects have included:

• Rebooting the business intelligence and data warehousing capabilities for one of the largest massive multiplayer online games in the world;
• Updating the data management plan of a multi-billion-dollar health system to reflect industry best-practices and reduce risk.
• Leading data management and governance activity for one of the Top 100 banks in the United States prior to its acquisition;
• Serving as interim Chief Technology Officer for 18 months, including leading the search for a permanent CTO for one of the largest mortgage originators in the United States;
• Establishing a management coaching program inside the mortgage originator’s 300-person sales force distributed over 20 branch offices; and
• Enabling a global consultancy to implement an entirely new business intelligence platform for learning management and compliance based on SQL Server and Microstrategy.

Additionally, Mr. Casti has extensive professional experience educating and coaching in a variety of settings, including:

• Writing and teaching the first course offered at the University of Oregon on network technology;
• Leading a team of instructors to develop and offer more than one hundred courses on Internet engineering in the mid-1990s;
• Training nearly one thousand staff on industrial quality and problem solving;
• Speaking regularly at international conferences on achieving peak performance both personally and in group settings; and
• Delivering countless workshops and coaching sessions on using creativity to solve business problems, improving software and IT engineering effectiveness, and managing for peak performance, delivered to organizations ranging from the US State Department to individual executives wishing to improve their personal leadership skills.