I’ve always been more interested in how things work than in staying neatly inside one field.
It started in the arts and humanities, studying art history at CU Boulder and then Oxford, where I became as interested in cultural institutions, collections, and economics as I was in the objects themselves. How does art become valuable? Why do we collect things? What is a museum for?
But I couldn't stay in one lane, and death of a friend in a bicycling accident pushed me to turn grief into action by starting a community bicycle workshop. It became an accidental education in entrepreneurship, operations, fundraising, people management, and what happens when an idea suddenly acquires rent, payroll, and customers. The Broken Spoke Bike Co-op remains a thriving Oxford institution 14 years on, teaching thousands of students and residents how to confidently and safely ride and fix bicycles.
That set a pattern. I kept experimenting: learning whiskey distillation and brand-building, working in stage management and the performing arts, building things, selling things, organizing people. Different worlds, same fascination with the invisible systems that make them work. Eventually I wanted to test myself on a bigger canvas - larger organizations, harder problems, more complexity - which led me to Cornell for an MBA.
Post-MBA, McKinsey widened the experiment dramatically. I could enter an unfamiliar industry, learn it quickly, and help untangle problems spanning strategy, operations, organization, customers, and growth. The industries changed constantly; the problems less so. I was most drawn to the things that fell between the cracks: ideas without business models, strategies without operating plans, teams that needed to work as one, and organizations outgrowing the way they had always done things.
The last two years have brought another round of exploration thanks to the explosive potential of GenAI. With a vision and strong prompts I’ve advised companies and increasingly turned ideas directly into digital products. What interests me most is not what technology can do, but what makes it genuinely useful: making complexity intuitive.
What's stayed constant is the instinct to run toward things I don’t yet understand, learn them deeply, and make something useful from what I find. I’m most energized by work that sits between disciplines, where the answer is not obvious, the path is not tidy, and progress depends on seeing the whole system clearly enough to change it.
