entrepreneur & amateur developer. i love to learn, build and teach.
beliefs
- children hardly listen but always imitate. act accordingly.
- be honest even when it's inconvenient, be kind always
- smile. there's always someone out there cooler than you.
- plan for the worst, then f-it, go for it.
- we should prioritize energy production over conservation
- we should separate money from state like we do with church and state
past (chronological)
- studied biomedical engineering & math at st. louis university
- quit med school at mizzou a week before classes started
- instead, taught 5th & 8th grade math/science via tfa in south Chicago
- after tfa, built an edtech startup (got lotsa users but nobody wanted to pay so we killed it)
- moved to austin to build MakerSquare, a coding bootcamp
- sold it to hack reactor and became ceo
- sold hack reactor in '14 to galvanize and became ceo... again
- sold galvanize in '20 to $LRN for $165m (this one was lifechanging)
- tried to retire, lasted 8 months, realized I'm a builder forever
- raised $6m from Coinbase & others in '22 to build Macro
- turned it profitable & returned capital to investors in '24
- throughout the above, lived in nyc, sf, denver, austin, and chicago
