David Mysona and the Work Behind the Exit

An $85 million sale makes a convenient ending. It gives a business story a number, a date, and the satisfying sound of a door closing. For David Mysona, the sale of Blackstone Technology Group’s federal division in January 2020 also left an opening. After more than 21 years leading the company he had helped found, there was another organization to advise, another technology platform to develop, and another set of operational problems waiting for attention.

The buyer was ASGN. The business being sold was Blackstone Federal, a division whose work included application development, cloud modernization, systems architecture, cybersecurity, and design for government customers. The transaction placed that team inside ECS. By July, ESM had announced Mysona as its new chairman, an appointment that also involved investing and advising. The distance between those two events was only a few months. The experience connecting them had taken decades to accumulate.

Mysona’s career invites a closer look at the work behind a founder’s title. There is energy consulting in it, and software for the natural gas business. There are government customers, colleagues building distinct businesses, and students presenting their projects to a returning alumnus. The recurring subject is practical: how organizations turn expertise into something another person can actually use.

The energy business came first

Before Blackstone, Mysona held managerial positions at Pacific Gas and Electric and Lockheed Missiles & Space. He then worked as a senior manager in Pricewaterhouse’s North American Energy Practice, where he led business development efforts related to the natural gas industry. Those jobs placed him around organizations with technical demands and substantial operating responsibilities. They also gave his later technology career a particular industrial setting.

His education joined engineering with the management of professional work. He earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Michigan State University in 1988 and completed Harvard Business School’s executive education program in Leading Professional Service Firms. One concerns technical systems; the other concerns businesses whose central resource is people’s expertise. Both subjects appear in the company he went on to help establish.

Blackstone Technology Group was founded in 1998. Mysona’s fellow co-founders included Casey Courneen and Rakesh Agrawal. Over the years, its activities extended across consulting, staffing, government technology, and energy software. That combination can look untidy on a business card. It becomes easier to understand when the customer’s question is about getting complicated work done, rather than buying a single fashionable technology.

There is paperwork inside a pipeline

Natural gas is a physical commodity with an administrative life. Agreements and transactions have to keep pace with its movement. Blackstone’s Trellis business addressed that layer, developing a platform for managing natural gas transactions and automating processes across the supply chain. The setting gave enterprise software a very concrete purpose: help an energy business coordinate the commercial work surrounding its operations.

In July 2016, Trellis Energy launched as a separate corporate entity, wholly owned by Blackstone. Agrawal became its CEO and president. The company also took on Blackstone’s digital services practice for the energy sector. Mysona, Courneen, and Agrawal were named as members of its executive board. The arrangement gave the energy business a distinct leadership structure while preserving its connection to the group that had developed it.

Mysona described the reorganization as a commitment to the platform’s growth. The decision was specific. A business that had grown within a consulting firm was getting its own corporate identity. Founders were making room for a product and its management team to operate within a separate organization.

The episode also supplies continuity in Mysona’s career. His work in natural gas preceded Blackstone. Years later, that industry remained part of the company’s software activity. The connection is useful because it brings an abstract phrase such as industry expertise down to earth. Earlier professional experience and a later business were dealing with the same commercial world.

One customer engagement puts that connection on the map. In 2015, Gaz Métro retained Blackstone to develop an information technology project in Québec. Mysona, then Blackstone’s CEO, signed an affidavit concerning the commercial information associated with the work. It is a modest piece of the career, involving a named customer and the terms surrounding a real engagement. It also moves the story beyond a description of software capabilities. There was a client across the border, a project to develop, and a business relationship with details that mattered enough for the chief executive to address personally.

The people behind the contract

Blackstone’s federal division developed along a different path. Founded in Arlington, Virginia, in 2002, it combined technical and creative work for government customers. By the time of the sale, its capabilities ranged from modernizing applications to designing user experiences. These are different disciplines, but they meet at a familiar point: a system has to function for the people expected to use it.

ASGN’s January 2020 acquisition announcement described a team of roughly 100 people and approximately $44 million in 2019 revenue. The business had a long relationship with the Department of Homeland Security and its agencies. It was being integrated into ECS’s enterprise solutions group, which served federal civilian customers. The acquisition therefore moved an operating team, customer relationships, and delivery capabilities into a larger organization.

That scope matters to Mysona’s story. The transaction concerned the federal division. Its price belongs to that business and that sale. Blackstone’s other activities had their own histories, including the energy operation that had already been organized as Trellis. Reading the event precisely makes the company’s development more interesting: different parts had acquired enough shape to follow different paths.

A founder’s biography often compresses these years into a line between establishment and exit. Here, the separate dates help. Blackstone began in 1998. The federal operation followed in 2002. Trellis became a separate company in 2016. The federal division changed ownership in 2020. There was time between those markers for teams to form and businesses to become distinct.

A question across the student table

There is a smaller scene in Mysona’s professional life that offers a welcome change of scale. At Michigan State University’s Spring 2017 Design Day, he served as a judge. A photograph from the event identifies him questioning Team Rook. A longtime technology executive was back at his university, listening to students explain a project and asking them about it.

The scene belongs alongside the executive roles. A project demonstration gives technical work a face and a voice. Someone has to explain what was built. Someone else gets to ask how it works. The format makes room for the kind of exchange that a résumé, with its orderly succession of titles, tends to leave out.

Mysona also served on the College of Engineering’s alumni board, and the university listed him among its Design Day judges in 2018. His connection to Michigan State thus continued well beyond his degree. The campus appears in the career as a place to return to, bringing professional experience back into contact with people preparing to begin their own working lives.

Culture makes it onto the agenda

In 2017, Mysona published two LinkedIn articles about leading a high performance organization. One addressed a question leaders should ask themselves. The other concerned driving culture through behavior. In the latter’s introduction, he said leaders of other organizations frequently asked him how office culture could be improved. Alongside the technical subjects in his career, he was publicly discussing how organizations are led.

Those article topics reveal an expressed professional interest without requiring a personality verdict. Mysona was addressing leadership and behavior while running a technology company. The conjunction is ordinary in daily business and easily lost in profiles devoted to products and transactions. Software needs a team behind it. Consulting needs people who can work together. A CEO has responsibilities on both sides of that equation.

“accelerating the future growth of the Trellis™ platform”

David Mysona, on the 2016 reorganization

Another company, another set of questions

ESM’s announcement of Mysona’s chairmanship in July 2020 emphasized his technology background and advisory role in developing its INSITE cloud platform. He joined an existing business with its own leadership and customers. The appointment gave his next chapter a different shape: investor, advisor, and chairman, bringing experience into a company rather than repeating the original founder’s job description.

The later record keeps that work in view. ESM’s 2024 overview named him as chairman, and its leadership page identifies him as chairman and investor. A 2022 Fremont Bancorporation filing also listed him as a director. These roles extend the professional story into governance, where experience is brought to a board table and decisions are made alongside other leaders.

The most useful ending is therefore an open one, with a documented change in responsibilities. Mysona helped establish Blackstone, led it for more than two decades, and saw its federal division sold. Then came another appointment and another business to help develop. The large number gives the story its punctuation. The work on either side gives it its subject.