I grew up in a small town in Northern California. My family ran a chain of video stores for thirty years — renting movies to farmers up in the hills who didn't have reliable internet. The same farmers I'd later partner with to build a cannabis distillate company. I was a top-fifteen distance runner in the country in high school, ran D1 at Oregon, and lost it to nerve damage in my foot. The piece of me that felt special was gone — and I spent the next decade trying to figure out what would replace it.
I moved to San Francisco in 2010 because that's where the world's best operators were, and I knew you don't get world-class without competing against the best. To survive on $15/hour I drove a limo at night and slept in it; rented out my apartment on Airbnb to cover rent; and managed a 16-unit building on the side. Side-hustle economics taught me more about leverage than any book.
I caught a break in customer service at GoPayGo, a venture-backed startup, and taught myself back-end engineering at night. From there I went to Byliner, then Pivotal Labs, then Teespring as a senior engineering manager — leading a global team of eleven, building a $60M revenue stream in a year when the company had 60 days to survive, and shipping a weekend project that drove $1M/month in profit. Teespring offered me VP of Engineering. I turned it down to start my own company. Engineering taught me how to ship; managing taught me how to operate.
"Time is the most valuable asset we have. The whole point is to earn enough of it back to spend it on things that actually matter."
In 2017 I co-founded SISU Extracts with Joe Wynne and Shannon Byers. The pitch was simple: build the most reliable distillate in California, and pay farmers a 70/30 split in their favor. Five years later we had grown from inception to $101M in annual revenue and were acquired in a $1B transaction with Jay-Z as Chief Visionary Officer. SISU is now employee-owned.
After SISU I went all-in on something I deeply care about — education. I founded Plaito, an AI tutor designed to dissolve the financial barrier between a student and a great teacher. We hit a million downloads, 130,000 weekly active users across 180 countries, in 40 languages. Ultimately the business didn't work — but the mission still does, and I'll keep returning to it.
Today I live in the Sierra foothills with my wife and son, running a deliberately lifestyle-shaped business: managing a real estate portfolio through SISU Ventures, and incubating and investing in companies I want to spend time around. I write about frameworks, habits, and the slow patient work of compounding. The whole point of building was always to earn back the time to do this — and the family it's for is the reason any of it matters.
Before all of this I was a runner — top fifteen in the country in high school for distance — and I still chase miles most mornings. The discipline that builds a company is the same discipline that builds a body of work. Show up. Suffer well. Compound.