I’ve lived the highs, lows, and all of the in-between of building a business.
I’ve started too many things to even count. Most were spectacular failures. A few had real legs though. Along the way, I’ve raised venture capital. Hired and fired people for all sorts of reasons. Signed Fortune 500 clients. Laid people off that I considered friends.
Years of the hustle took its toll.
My friendship with my co-founder evaporated. My marriage began to crumble. I missed the majority of my son’s first year of life. My mental and physical health deteriorated. I told everyone “we were crushing it!” On the inside, I was being crushed.
I was sacrificing it all to win; and losing myself in the process.
I can be quite stubborn, so things got pretty bad before I considered a different approach. I began to look inward for answers.
Only then did I start noticing the stories that I had been telling myself – many for decades – about who I am and who I need to be.
Stories about how I wasn’t good enough. That I needed to have all of the answers (but I knew I didn’t). That I was an impostor. That I couldn’t trust others. That I needed to achieve in order to belong.
Today I partner with founders and leaders as their coach. To help them turn inward. To find deeper truths that reveal their path forward as they lead people and build business.
My Background
I am a 3x founder, ICF-certified coach, and partner at Evolution (a coaching, consulting, and investment firm focused on supporting startups and their leaders as they scale).
I've supported founders and senior leaders at startups from seed-stage through IPO including people at Slack, Notion, Bandcamp, Firstbase, Twitter, MagicSpoon, Bond Pet Foods, and a bunch of other early-stage companies that you probably haven't heard of just yet. You can learn more about the work that I do today here.
I've been an entrepreneur most of my entire life due to a rather fateful encounter in a bathroom. That summer, my best friend's dad thought he was doing me a favor by setting me up with a job as an Assistant at a high-end auto repair shop. I was curious about cars and how they worked. I was eager to learn and the pay was half-decent.
But on the first day, my boss handed me a mop and told me that the bathroom needed cleaning.
I was a janitor by another name. My heart sank. It was just part of the territory I figured.
I rolled the mop bucket across the room and opened the bathroom door. My jow dropped at the filth before me. A crusty pile of porn mags in the corner completed the sickening ambiance.
I walked out that day. Never went back.
I've been doing my own thing ever since. Weeks later I was painting houses in my neighborhood earning more in two weeks than I would have mopping floors all summer. I fell in love with business. Then I discovered the Internet. I've been building ever since.
I went to the University of Michigan (Go Blue!) for my undergrad in computer engineering. I went back again a few years later for my MBA, although in hindsight, I wish I'd just joined a startup to learn hands-on. You live and you learn from your choices.
I'm married with two kids. We live in Boulder, Colorado after nearly a decade in the South Bay of Los Angeles. I like cats. I'm not ashamed of it.
In my free time, you'll find me running on the Mesa Trail in the front range foothills, skiing from our cabin up in Winter Park, or reading a few too many books at a time.