Full Stack Operator-Investor
I set two goals for my career: never polish a résumé again and earn the right to teach an MBA class without getting one. So I chased problems with the steepest learning curves and the biggest combo of upside and impact: from a then-senator from Illinois’s run for president to investing in 17 founders in a small Midwestern town, unlocking trapped wealth for 367 homeowners, and scaling the largest climate-mitigation project in the open ocean.
Commercial
Brand & Marketing: Built multiple growth/marketing engines, built brands end-to-end, running both in-house marketing teams and external agencies.
Sales & GTM: Built and managed sales teams, set quotas and pipeline dashboards, closed seven figure enterprise contracts.
Global BD: Structured JVs and market entries across North America, Europe, and Asia, pairing distribution with local regulatory wins.
Government Relations & Public Affairs: Built GR functions, secured first-of-kind permits, and turned policy outcomes into revenue.
Product Ownership: Owned product development and led engineering teams from concept to launch.
Policy
Government: Served in White House legislative-affairs and DHS with TS/SCI clearance.
Regulatory: Led bilateral negotiations with G7 ministers; secured first-of-its-kind agreements in Iceland and Canada, turning approvals into revenue.
Network: Developed relationships with policymakers, bureaucrats, and lobbyists across the globe.
Range: Comfortable dissecting the intricacies of single-family housing law and the international law of the sea.
Operations
P&L Owner: Full revenue, cost, and cash-flow responsibility for tech and investment operations.
Finance, Audit, Tax: Built FP&A models, led external audits, managed multi-jurisdiction tax strategy.
Legal & Risk: Coordinated outside counsel and served as CCO for an institutional investment fund.
People & Culture: Scaled orgs from first hire to 100+, recruiting, hiring, firing, setting goals, comp bands, and review cycles.
Strategy: Built and owned corporate strategy from international expansion, budgeting, to fundraising.
Creative
Design: Co-founder and board member of an award-winning furniture and interior design firm.
Brand Builder: Built brands seen by millions across retail, tech, media, and financial sectors.
Writer: Craft speeches, brand narratives, policy briefs, technical white papers, and legal analyses.
Public Speaker: Communicate complex ideas into clear stories that resonate in boardrooms, investor meetings, and on global conference stages.
Investing
Early-Stage VC: Built a pre-seed fund backing 17 companies; helped spark a Midwestern tech hub.
Institutional Real Estate Fund: Built institutional fund on a novel strategy to invest in 367 single-family assets, 25% un-levered IRR.
Structuring: Raised venture, real-estate, and carbon-credit vehicles; advised on SPVs and follow-ons across SAFEs, equity, credit, and project finance.
Data
Research: Designed and ran focus groups, IDIs, and quant research; turned human insight and large-N data into strategy.
AI: Built personal AI tool that fuses LLM's with quantitative methods to value private-market companies.
Modeling: Trained economist; sabermetrics nerd led to working on Obama ’08’s first online ad-targeting and voting-behavior models.
Themes
Access to Capital & Wealth Creation
Prosperity hinges on who can access affordable capital and build assets.
Coolhouse Labs seeded 17 first-time founders and mentored high-school entrepreneurs.
Patch Capital partnered with 367 homeowners, erased $9.7 million in high-cost debt, and freed an average $1,502 in monthly cash-flow relief.
Next-Generation Education & Learning
A twentieth-century school system wastes twenty-first-century talent.
Teach.org campaign recruited thousands of future teachers.
Coolhouse backed two ed-tech companies working on the future of eduction.
Next-Generation Industrials
Re-engineering energy, materials, and data infrastructure is mission-critical—and a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity.
Running Tide scaled open-ocean geoengineering from labs to commercial contracts with Microsoft.
Planet Farms is revolutionizing demand driven agriculture with a joint venture with Swiss Life that directed up to €125 million into five new plant factories across Europe.
Wellinghall guides next-generation industrial companies as they work to commercialize their technology globally.
Food & Health Access
Nutrition and primary care anchor environmental, wellness, and economic security.
Early advisor to Radish Health, improving frontline access to primary care.
Advised American Spoon’s growth from small local retailer to national DTC player so more revenue flows to Northern Michigan farmers and foragers..
Housing
Housing is America’s largest store of wealth and we need to build more of it.
Patch Capital’s equity-sharing model keeps families in their homes while delivering double-digit returns to institutional investors.