My resume makes considerably more sense once you know one thing about me. I’m relentlessly curious, and I’ve never been interested in staying in a lane simply because it’s the lane I already know.
I want to understand how industries actually work. Why systems ended up shaped the way they are. Where people get stuck. What a new technology genuinely changes and what it only appears to. And, most usefully, what everyone inside an industry accepts as completely normal that looks bizarre to anyone standing outside it.
That last one is almost always where the opportunity is.
I started as a lawyer
Before any of the rest of it, I practised. Three years as Vice President and Associate Counsel at Hovde Capital Advisors, carrying operational responsibility across a hedge fund that peaked around $1.2 billion, an investment bank, and a foundation, including leading the team that took over the technology and operations of a failed bank. Then a stint as General Counsel at JESS3, a design studio, supporting clients that included NASA, Twitter, MTV, Bravo, and Red Bull.
The law degree and the MBA came together, both from Washington University in St. Louis, between 2003 and 2007. Doing them at the same time is either efficient or a warning sign, depending on who you ask.
I’m still barred in Washington, DC. I don’t practise now, but the training never left, and it turns out to be unreasonably useful when the thing you’re trying to understand is a system rather than a product.
Building communities
I founded Fosterly in 2011 to connect entrepreneurs and strengthen the startup ecosystem around Washington, DC. It put me in the middle of founders, investors, agencies, universities, and people trying to build things that didn’t exist yet.
We built the region’s largest startup and creative economy index, collecting more than 72,000 data points from local jurisdictions in 2017 and 2018. Tulane has run its own version in Greater New Orleans every year since, and Fosterly continues to support that effort. We ran a race-blind and gender-blind internship match connecting university students to the region’s creative economy, and dozens of events that brought together well over a thousand entrepreneurs.
Fosterly never really ended. It’s now the vehicle I use for advisory work and speaking, and it has carried some of the work I’m proudest of: advising the USO on the launch of its Military Virtual Programming initiative during the pandemic, and several years advising Public Democracy on applying machine learning to the opioid epidemic, veterans issues, and opportunity zones.
I learned a great deal about entrepreneurship. I learned considerably more about people. And I found out that one of the things I’m genuinely good at is working out who ought to know whom.
Technology, media, and innovation
I spent seven years at Discovery, arriving as a business analyst in technology innovation and leaving as Director of Ventures and Innovation.
In the middle of that I built the Consumer Experience Lab, an eight-hundred-square-foot room full of cutting-edge consumer technology that existed so employees and partners could put their hands on the future rather than read about it. I assembled the Virtual Reality Task Force that became Discovery VR, and shipped the company’s first voice experiences, Discovery News, Shark Week, and Project CAT, back when talking to a speaker still felt like a stunt. I also spearheaded the company’s move to cloud platforms, Box and DocuSign among them.
As Director I created Discovery Communications Ventures, the company’s strategic investment arm, and owned its thesis, its sourcing, and its branding. The portfolio’s value increased by more than 1,500 percent over three years, unexited, before counting what any of it was strategically worth to Discovery.
My old biography calls the role Discovery’s “global intrapreneur and futurist.” I’m keeping that here as historical record rather than as a current job title.
Around the same period I became one of CNBC’s regular guest analysts on technology. They would cut to me for a Q and A, which is a particular kind of pressure. You get a minute or two, live, to make something genuinely complicated land with an audience who will not be reading a follow-up. It remains the best training I’ve had for everything since.
Alongside it I co-founded Variable Labs, which built immersive training in virtual and augmented reality for American Airlines, Facebook, Google, Arizona State, Grant Thornton, and the Shoah Foundation, and built a VR negotiation simulation for the White House’s Hack the Pay Gap initiative. And for three years I taught Strategies for Innovation and Entrepreneurship as an adjunct professor in the University of Maryland’s Hillman Entrepreneurs Program, which is the best way I know to find out whether you actually understand something.
Looking around the world
In June 2018 I was named an Eisenhower Fellow, one of nine selected to spend four weeks traveling through China. My project was the market potential of blockchain, which at the time everyone associated with tracking Bitcoin and almost nobody had looked at as business infrastructure.
The subjects mattered. The people mattered more. Travel is unusually good at showing you how many of your assumptions were never truths at all. They were just things everyone around you happened to agree on.
Nuclear energy
From 2020 to 2023 I was VP of Business Development at Last Energy, which develops small modular nuclear power projects and is trying to make nuclear buildable again by attacking the time and cost of construction rather than the physics. It was a crash course in energy, infrastructure, regulation, government, project finance, and international dealmaking, compressed into three years.
I’m not a nuclear engineer. That was rather the point. The job was to understand enough of the technical, commercial, political, and regulatory picture to connect the people and the pieces that move a complicated project forward. Which, it turns out, is the same job I’ve always had.
Then the problem got personal
Eventually the complicated system I found myself trying to understand wasn’t an emerging technology or a new market.
It was death.
In July 2023 I stepped away from Last Energy after three years. My father died shortly afterwards, following a seven-year battle with leukemia. Six and a half years before that I had donated bone marrow to him, which meant I got to joke that he kept me around for spare parts.
I served as the executor of his estate. There were legal documents. There were accounts. There were professionals. And there was still an extraordinary amount to work out.
Death creates two realities at once. There is grief, and there is logistics. Nobody warns you that the logistics arrive first, and that they don’t wait for you to be ready.
I became fascinated, and then genuinely frustrated, by the gap between traditional estate planning and the enormous quantity of practical information a family actually needs. The legal documents are maybe a fifth of it. The rest is accounts, passwords, subscriptions, contacts, wishes, and the sixteen phone calls nobody has written down anywhere.
So I did the thing I’ve done my entire career. I started pulling the system apart to see how it worked.
Buried in Work
That became Buried in Work. What started as my own experience and a spreadsheet is now education, tools, directories, checklists, physical products, a podcast, a book, software, and a charitable arm.
Heirloom & Tell came from the same instinct pointed at a different question. End of Life Careers documents the professions that surround death, most of which nobody hears about until they need one. RetURN.org takes on what happens when cremated remains outlast the people who know whose they are.
The problems look nothing like the ones I worked on earlier. The process is identical. Get curious. Learn fast. Find good people. Connect the dots. Build something useful.
A few things on the record
I hold a United States patent, number 11,207,952, for a method of presenting virtual and augmented reality inside a moving vehicle by matching the route you’re actually on to a route somewhere else in the world. It was granted in December 2021 and it’s the single most unlikely line on my resume.
Beyond the China fellowship, Eisenhower Fellowships named me its 2019 J.T. Tai Fellow, an annual recognition for commitment to the advancement of medical education and healthcare. Washingtonian has named me a Tech Titan twice, and I have been on a 40 Under 40 list. I served on the Board of Advisors of Plant A Million Corals, and spent six years on the board of Friends of Screen on the Green.
Outside of work
The curiosity doesn’t clock off.
I’ve traveled to 38 countries, and I believe one of the best ways to understand the world is to experience it through food, shared with the people who call it home.
I’ve climbed Kilimanjaro, biked Bolivia’s Death Road, built homes in rural Peru, assembled bicycles in Zambia, run marathons, finished triathlons, and ridden a great many more miles on a bicycle than seemed advisable at the outset.
I keep honeybees.
There are photographs proving most of this.