I’ve always been more interested in how things work than in staying neatly inside one field.
It started in the arts and humanities, studying art history at CU Boulder and then Oxford, where I became as interested in cultural institutions, collections, and economics as I was in the objects themselves. How does art become valuable? Why do we collect things? What is a museum for?
But I couldn't stay in one lane, and the death of a friend in a bicycling accident pushed me to turn grief into action by starting a community bicycle workshop. It became an accidental education in entrepreneurship, operations, fundraising, people management, and what happens when an idea suddenly acquires rent, payroll, and customers. The Broken Spoke Bike Co-op remains a thriving Oxford institution 14 years on, teaching thousands of students and residents how to confidently and safely ride and fix bicycles.
That set a pattern. I kept experimenting: learning whiskey distillation and brand-building, working in stage management and the performing arts, building things, selling things, organizing people. Different worlds, same fascination with the invisible systems that make them work. Eventually I wanted to test myself on a bigger canvas, which led me to Cornell for an MBA.
Post-MBA, McKinsey widened the experiment dramatically. I could enter an unfamiliar industry, learn it quickly, and help untangle problems spanning strategy, operations, organization, customers, and growth. The industries changed constantly; the problems less so. What does a 100-year-old toys and games company have in common with an international sports league and a Web3 music venture? In my experience, the hardest problems weren't about finding the right ideas. They were about figuring out how to execute them: redesigning operating models, bringing structure to messy functions, and turning emerging opportunities into viable businesses. That's where I've focused my career.
The last two years have brought another round of exploration thanks to the explosive potential of GenAI. With a vision and strong prompts I’ve advised companies and increasingly turned ideas directly into digital products. What interests me most is not what technology can do, but what makes it genuinely useful: making complexity intuitive.
What's stayed constant is the instinct to run toward things I don’t yet understand, learn them deeply, and make something useful from what I find. Those problems usually sit between disciplines, where progress only occurs once you can see the whole system well enough to change it.
