Nine figures of real estate, run like an operation
Company-wide ownership of real estate and facilities at Lightmatter — over $100M in transactions negotiated and more than $10M of lab-equipped build-outs delivered in under two years, both under budget, alongside the IT and security organization.
A growing hardware company that needed real space, fast.
Photonics is a physical business — it needs labs, clean environments, and room to grow into. As Lightmatter scaled, real estate and facilities became a genuine constraint on the company, not a back-office afterthought.
Facilities was handed to Aaron deliberately, because of his operational background — a vote of confidence that the person who could build the IT and security org could also build the physical one. The mandate carried real capital behind it: over $100M in real estate transactions and more than $10M of construction, delivered while the company kept shipping — and delivered under budget.
What the work actually was.
Company-wide ownership
Assumed control of all real estate and facilities across the organization, folding a physical operation into an already-broad technology mandate.
Over $100M in real estate transactions
Negotiated and closed more than $100M of real estate deals, aligning long-term site strategy with the company's growth curve.
$10M of build-outs, both under budget
Delivered over $10M of construction and fit-out — including purpose-built lab space — in under two years, with both projects landing under budget. Identified a further $67K in savings on the Mountain View build alone.
Multi-site delivery
Stood up and moved into sites across Boston, Mountain View, Toronto, and Palo Alto — including a 7,989 sq ft Toronto suite live in May 2026 — with the IT and network build-out delivered in lockstep so teams landed in working, lab-ready space.
Capital recovery and controls
Tracked $2.51M of the $2.54M entitled tenant-improvement reimbursement on the Boston project, reconciled directly with Finance and Facilities.
Technology and space as one program
Ran conference-room AV, structured cabling, switching, circuits, and network resiliency as part of the same delivery — so the building and the systems inside it came online together.
Facilities service management, automated
Brought Facilities onto the same AI-agent service desk built for IT — a large share of Facilities requests now resolve without a person touching them, one of the highest deflection rates of any queue in the company.
What it delivered.
“Facilities came to me because of the operations background. Over $100M in transactions and $10M of build-outs in under two years, both under budget — it is the same discipline as any build.”
Four ways it mattered.
Nine figures of real estate transacted against real growth pressure.
$10M of build-outs delivered under budget, twice.
Purpose-built environments for a physical, photonics business.
Sites and the systems inside them delivered as one program.
