About me

Curiosity has taken me places.

I'm a curious person by nature. I grew up in Topeka, Kansas, and I've spent most of my life following interesting things further than I probably needed to.

That has taken me through technology, financial products, risk, music, film, travel, photography, and plenty of other interests along the way. I used to feel some pressure to explain how all of those things fit together. I don't anymore. They're different interests. They just keep teaching each other things.

People tend to call me when they need another brain on something. Sometimes it's a product people aren't adopting. Sometimes it's an idea that needs positioning or validation. Sometimes they just want to talk through a situation with someone who will look at it from a different angle.

I've gotten good at walking into ambiguity, reading a room, seeing second-order effects, translating between people who see the same situation differently, and taking something fuzzy far enough that a useful next move becomes clear.

I've built products, led fraud and risk work at scale, helped teams navigate complicated product and regulatory questions, and brought payment systems into environments where they had to work in front of thousands of people. Now I'm especially interested in helping founders and teams figure out what they should make, whether an idea is actually working, how to get people to care about it, and what needs to happen next.

The work has also taught me not to rush good thinking. Some things need time. Sometimes the useful move is to keep working. Sometimes it's to go for a walk, get outside, and come back seeing something you couldn't see before. I've learned to trust that.

Music has been the other constant. I've spent somewhere around twenty to thirty thousand hours at the piano, composed for film, designed sound, performed, and kept making things because I wanted to know what they could become. I want to do more of that too, especially with people who care enough to make something incredible.

I'm usually learning something: reading, studying, traveling, following a rabbit hole, or talking with someone doing something I've never done before. Being around people who are excellent at what they do keeps changing what I think is possible.

I want work that keeps my mind awake. I want to make things I'm proud of. And I want doing those things to keep putting me in the orbit of thoughtful, talented, genuinely good people.

I'm less interested in fitting everything into a neat professional story. I'm more interested in useful ideas, difficult questions, excellent people, and seeing what we can make together.