I'm a fifth-generation Californian, born in Berkeley and raised just east in Orinda, close enough to the water that I was in it early. I was also 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. Some of that energy went into a controller, too. I played a lot of video games through middle and 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 the run of the outdoors. What shaped me most was the Eagle project. I had to plan it, line up the materials, and lead a crew of other scouts to build a bench and a retaining wall at the Orinda Senior Village. It was the first time I owned something end to end, a plan and an execution and a team to run it with, at an age when most of that is usually done for you. Two things stuck: I liked building, and I liked 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 and captained both, first as a junior, which meant leading the team a year earlier than most people get to. Swimming was where the bigger thing happened: I broke a national high school record in the 100 breaststroke, and for a while the Olympics stopped sounding like a fantasy and started sounding like a plan. 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 form, I was tracking all my training on a first-generation Jawbone UP, the one you synced through the headphone jack, back when almost nobody wore a computer on their wrist.

I went to Stanford to keep chasing that plan, on a swim scholarship, playing water polo too. Two 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. Telling my coach I wouldn't be back for my senior season was one of the hardest calls I've ever made; 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. A History of Science course I took at the Galileo Museum in Florence, while studying abroad and living with a nonno and nonna who didn't speak a lick of English, 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. Recovering with time on my hands, I also fell down the crypto rabbit hole, and put early conviction behind Bitcoin and Ethereum. I made friends from Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur, and Istanbul, whole worlds I'd never been near inside an athlete's schedule. I've stayed close to Stanford in the years since, interviewing undergraduate applicants and serving on our class 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 what matters most is whether you keep growing.

On calls I still put it simply: I fell down the crypto rabbit hole, then went to work for a project called Tezos. What actually happened is that I'd been writing about the space, and my writing caught the eye of the Tezos founders, who offered me a job. The summer before, I'd had my first look at venture from the inside, interning at Chengwei Capital in China, briefing its founder, Eric Li, on crypto, and representing the firm at the 2017 Global Blockchain Summit in Shanghai; it left me wanting to build first, so that one day I could back founders as someone who had actually sat in their seat. Being early also led to some unlikely conversations: in 2017 I talked Jimmy Buffett into buying his first Bitcoin, and later advised him and the Margaritaville team on their early NFT projects. At Tezos I was the first team member at the foundation, helped launch the network while living with the founders in Paris, 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 business development and go-to-market and 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 in October 2019 for the work. Around the same time, in 2019, 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 work on automation.

I was already in New York when I joined Callin, David Sacks's next company, as the second employee and Director of Business Development. It was a consumer social product, and I ran most of what wasn't engineering. I helped pitch and close a $12M Series A co-led by Sequoia, Craft Ventures, and Goldcrest, drove creator acquisition and product adoption, and worked side by side with David on our marquee creators. After a summer back in San Francisco, I returned to open our New York office. 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.

Pong was inspired by my wife. 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 threads, out of reach of everyone else, was the whole idea. Pong pulled those answers into a shared, cross-platform memory layer, kept current so teammates and their AI tools could actually use them. The name came from my own docs, where I kept typing "ping" until I flipped it: Pong, for every ping. I built and bootstrapped it in San Francisco, mostly on my own, though for a good stretch I got to work again with a former colleague from Callin. Advised by David Schmaier of Salesforce, I built it AI-native: I used Claude Code every day, across engineering, design, marketing, and go-to-market, which kept us extraordinarily lean. I never raised, because I wanted real signs of product-market fit before I took anyone's money. They didn't come, and the ground was shifting underneath the idea too, as Slack moved to build in the AI access I'd been bridging and compressed the space I was working in. After two years I wound it down.

The way I put it to David was that I could have kept my head down and kept going forever, but that's a signal I had to listen to from the market. Winding it down 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 that's the only scorecard I trust anymore.

These days I'm back in San Francisco, home in the West, with a home base up at Lake Tahoe and, soon, a bigger family. 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. 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 for what comes next. Outside of work you'll usually find me hiking with Genevieve, reading history, and doing my best to turn strangers into friends. A few words from a wedding toast I once gave sum up how I try to live: love fiercely, live glass half full, cherish friends, and always be down for fun.

I'm moving from operator to investor. I bootstrapped Pong on purpose, and going without outside capital taught me exactly what venture gives a founder: speed, more shots at iterating, and the runway to keep going long enough to find what works. What I can offer a founder that's genuinely rare is having sat in the seat myself, across crypto, consumer, and enterprise, and knowing the shape of the work from the inside. That's the side of the table I want to be on now: backing the people building what's next, as someone who has been there.