I'm a fifth-generation Californian, born in Berkeley and raised just east in Orinda. I was the kid who needed the newest gadget before anyone else knew it existed; my parents called me "gear guy," and it stuck because it fit. My Dad would take me to Fry's Electronics and I'd spend hours marveling at all the gadgets and technology. Some of that energy went into a controller, too. I played a lot of video games through high school, competitive enough to reach a rank of 49 out of 50 on Team Slayer in Halo 3. Being early to new things started as a hobby, long before it became anything else.

I joined Cub Scouts in second grade and stayed all the way through to Eagle. Scouting gave me a lot along the way: merit badges across dozens of subjects, summer camps, backpacking, whitewater rafting, and a love of the outdoors. What shaped me most was the Eagle project. I had to plan it, fundraise for it, line up the materials (thank you Ashby Lumber in Berkeley), and lead a crew of other scouts to excavate a decrepit retaining wall and install a new one, along with a new seating area, at the Orinda Senior Village. I learned firsthand how nasty poison oak can be. It was the first time I owned a project like this end to end, a plan and an execution and a team to run with it, the kind of ownership few people get at 16. A few things stuck: I loved the strategizing and the building, and I loved doing it in service of the people and community around me. I still hold the Scout Oath, Law, Motto, and Slogan close; they were the first operating principles I had, and most of the ones I've picked up since rhyme with them.

For a long stretch, my life was in the water. I swam and played water polo at Miramonte High School and captained both, first as a junior, which meant leading the team while still a year younger than most of the squad. I loved the strategy, physicality, and team element of water polo, but swimming was where the bigger accomplishments happened: I broke a national high school record in the 100-yard breaststroke, talked about it afterward on the Morning Swim Show, and for a while the Olympics were a realistic goal. At graduation I received the Principal's Award and spoke to my class. Senior year was also when Genevieve asked me to her junior prom; now we're married! And true to my "gear guy" roots, I was tracking all my training on a first-generation Jawbone UP band, the one you synced through the headphone jack, back when almost nobody wore a wearable.

I went to Stanford to keep chasing that plan, on a swim scholarship, playing water polo too. Two collegiate sports at once is a lot, more demanding physically and mentally than anything I'd done. Then, junior year, both hips gave out (torn labrums), one surgery and then another, and the Olympic dream I'd built my life around quietly closed. For a while I felt like I'd lost, like the years and the sacrifices had all been for nothing.

It turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me. The thirty hours a week the pool had taken were suddenly mine, and I spent them on everything being an athlete had crowded out. For the first time, I could swim outside the lane lines. I had room for the classes I'd never been able to fit, and time to chase ideas. Stepping away from sport also let me study abroad in Florence, and it cracked my worldview wide open: I lived with a nonno and nonna who didn't speak a lick of English, and fell headlong into history of science, philosophy of science, economic sociology, and Renaissance art history. A History of Science course I took at the Galileo Museum there grew into my honors thesis, an argument that the modern computing era is the third great wave of automation, after Classical Antiquity and the Industrial Revolution.

I've stayed close to Stanford in the years since, interviewing undergraduate applicants, mentoring students going through it now, and serving on our fifth reunion committee, which helped raise more than $1.1M. I learned more in those two years than in all the ones I'd spent swimming laps, and I came away believing something I still hold: that steady growth outlasts any single goal you set for yourself.

It began in 2015, when I started playing around with a new fintech app that had just launched, Robinhood. That was just curiosity at first, but while I was laid up recovering from hip surgery, it grew into something real: I began researching companies and found myself drawn to technology and to investing in it. Around then I read about bitcoin, and the deeper I got into the socio-political implications of the technology, the further down the crypto rabbit hole I went. I built up high-conviction early positions in Bitcoin and Ethereum. After graduating from Stanford, I interned at Chengwei Capital, one of China's first independent venture capital firms and now a preeminent one. I researched blockchain protocols and briefed its founder on the emerging crypto landscape, then traveled to Shanghai with the firm for the 2017 Global Blockchain Summit. Not long after, I came across Tezos and started writing about it. The founders liked what I wrote, reached out, and I joined and moved to Paris. It just so happened to be the same summer France won the World Cup too, which was a once-in-a-lifetime experience to be there for it.

In 2017, I talked Jimmy Buffett into buying his first Bitcoin, and later advised him and the Margaritaville team on some early NFT projects (ask me about Jimmy texting me that he "landed in the Hudson River" before one of our meetings). Crypto was global from the start. I worked and forged relationships with friends from all over the world. At Tezos I was the first team member at the Switzerland-based Tezos Foundation, helped launch the first proof-of-stake network, and ran the grantmaking program that put millions of dollars into the ecosystem. I was also on the founding team of TQ Tezos, our US entity, where I worked on everything, from business development and go-to-market, to product and project management. I also helped educate policymakers on Capitol Hill about crypto and blockchain, before eventually becoming chief of staff to the CTO. Genevieve and I moved to New York City in October 2019. Around the same time, I made my first direct investment in a technology startup, a robotic cloud lab automating scientific experimentation, a thesis-driven bet that grew straight out of my honors thesis on automation.

Callin was David Sacks's next company, which he co-founded with Axel Ericsson. It was a consumer social product, and I joined as the second employee and Director of Business Development. It was started and headquartered in an apartment in San Francisco. I was living in NYC, and after a summer building the MVP and beta program in SF, I returned East to open our NYC office. Early on, I ran most of what wasn't engineering: managing our beta program while the app was in TestFlight, helping pitch and close a $12M Series A co-led by Sequoia, Craft Ventures, and Goldcrest, driving creator acquisition and product adoption, and working side by side with David on our marquee creators. Callin is where I became a product-first thinker, sitting between our most valuable users and the product team and turning what they told me into fast iteration. We were acquired by Rumble in 2023.

The idea for Pong came from my wife's experience on Slack. Genevieve is an enterprise account executive at Workday, and watching how her team's best answers kept getting trapped in Slack DMs and in ChatGPT and Claude conversations, out of reach of everyone else and their AI tools, was what inspired it. Pong pulled those answers into a shared, cross-platform memory layer (we called it "Intentional Memory"), kept current right from Slack so teammates and their AI tools could actually trust them. The name "Pong" came from a slogan, "Never answer the same ping twice" (ping-pong). I bootstrapped it, starting in NYC, where for a good stretch I got to work again with a former colleague from Callin, and built the last eighteen months solo after moving to San Francisco. Advised by David Schmaier, president and chief strategy officer of Salesforce, I built it AI-native: I used Cursor, the Claude Code CLI tool, Railway, and a variety of other agentic developer tools every day, across engineering, design, marketing, and go-to-market, which kept us extraordinarily lean and effective. I never raised outside capital, because I wanted real signs of product-market fit before I took anyone's money. Those signs didn't come, and the enterprise software market changed a lot too. After two years I wound it down.

That was hard, and I'd been somewhere like it before, standing at the edge of a pool I was sure I'd failed in. The athletic version taught me the lesson I keep relearning: the growth is in the hard part, not around it. So I have no regrets. I came out of Pong better than I went in, and I'm grateful for that.

These days Genevieve and I are back in San Francisco, home on the Western Frontier. As a fifth-generation Californian, I've fallen for the history of San Francisco and the American West: the Gold Rush, the railroads, the strange and specific stories like how the Tahoe basin was nearly logged bare, its timber flumed down to feed the Comstock mines (ask me about the history of Glenbrook, Lake Tahoe! And see my book rec for "The Bonanza King"). I keep coming back to it because it rhymes with technology. California has always been the edge, the place people came to build something new and to be a little out of place while they did it. That's the cultural water Silicon Valley swims in, and a big part of why I love being here. It's home and I'm most comfortable at the edge. Outside of work you'll usually find me up in Tahoe, hiking with Genevieve, reading history, and making friends with strangers.

Professionally, I built startups. Now I back founders doing the same. I bootstrapped Pong on purpose, and going without outside capital taught me exactly what venture capital gives a founder: speed, more shots at iterating, people who have skin-in-the-game alongside you, and the runway to keep going long enough to find what works. What I offer founders is having sat in the seat myself, across crypto, consumer, and enterprise; I've lived the entrepreneurial grind multiple times and know the shape of the work from the inside. That's what I'm passionate about now: backing talented individuals building future leading companies, right alongside them every step of the way through the ups and downs. Let's win!