Dan Capetta Book an intro call

About

I have spent my career making technology useful to the people who run the business.

The start

It began with systems

I started in higher education IT as a systems administrator and grew into a technical systems manager. I led the technology behind student affairs, including the point-of-sale systems for dining services, with teams supporting 12,000+ students living on campus. That is where I learned that people using technology do not care how it works. They care that it does.

University of Connecticut campus in autumn, with a white cupola and gold dome rising above brick buildings and fall foliage
The University of Connecticut campus, where it started.

Scale

Delivery at scale

I moved into a Fortune 25 health services company, first as a consultant, then as an architect and product owner. The problem was wait time: teams stalled on each other and on production data. I led the move to service virtualization and modern CI/CD for about 5,000 engineers, then the enterprise DevOps program for 7,000+, including roughly 3,000 more who joined through an acquisition. I learned to treat delivery speed as a business problem.

The platform years

Building the organization behind the platform

At a Fortune 500 industrial distributor I built and led a 135-person platform and enablement organization. We ran platforms as products, with roadmaps, named customers, and a technical product management function I started from zero. We cut cloud spend 30-35%, moved delivery to elite performance, and rolled AI out to 800+ engineers for a 10%+ productivity gain. I am proudest that the organization went from 80% consultants to 80% employees, with the highest internal promotion rate in the company.

Advising

Technology for a $550M business

In parallel, I served as the technology lead for a $550M distribution subsidiary. The first win was not a system. It was fixing a process that cost the sales team an estimated 8,000 hours a year, so the automation that followed had something solid to build on. I left a roadmap and an operating model the team now runs on its own.

Beyond work

Flying

I am a licensed private pilot with 80+ hours, which taught me that good judgment is mostly preparation.

Dan smiling in a beanie and sunglasses, standing beside a white single-engine airplane on the ramp on a clear autumn day
Right after my first solo flight.

Giving back

Public Invention

I help Public Invention, a 501(c)(3) that builds open-source humanitarian inventions, get those inventions adopted by the people they are meant for. An invention that never reaches its users has not done its job.

Visit pubinv.org

Education

  • BS, Computer Science

    University of Connecticut

  • MBA, Operations & Information Management

    University of Connecticut, School of Business

  • Advanced Business Certificate, Project Management

    University of Connecticut

If this sounds like the leader you need, book an intro call or find me on LinkedIn.