On Becoming
This didn't come from a straight line.
I was supposed to go to law school. I ended up bartending with a startup founder instead and never looked back. Since then I've been fired for being disruptive to the status quo. I've worked for sweat equity with no salary. I pitched to take over a company from its own founder. I started an impact investing tech company that got tremendous feedback from users and failed to raise money in a risk-averse city.
I also spent nearly eight years on a carousel of opioid addiction after a devastating rugby injury in college. I had a seizure in the office. That was the moment I realized something had to change. It's been 3,796 days since I last took an opioid painkiller. I'll hit 4,000 days sober on October 13, 2026 — my ninth wedding anniversary.
Recovery taught me more about systems than any business book. Addiction is, at its core, an incentive design problem — where short-term signals overwhelm long-term aims. Getting clean required the same discipline I now bring to organizations: name the real problem, stop rationalizing drift, and commit to a direction even when the data is incomplete.
Vulnerability is a muscle that can be practiced and built just like any other. The rewards from doing so are almost immeasurable.
I've watched teams spend years building without asking what they were building toward. I've done the same thing in my own life. The cost is the same in both cases — time you don't get back, spent on motion that felt productive but wasn't anchored to anything real.
The leaders I work best with share something in common: they're willing to confront uncomfortable truths about their organizations, their incentives, and sometimes about themselves. That's not weakness. That's where alignment actually begins.
