About

I was born in Northern California and spent most of my childhood in the northern San Joaquin Valley. A short stint in Montana, however, kindled a love for the Rocky Mountains that burned gently at first but eventually led to a conflagration. My parents moved back to California in 1997, eventually settling in Oakdale, where I spent the formative years of my childhood and adolescence. I went to Oakdale High from 2005 to 2009, where I played three sports, met many lifelong friends (as of writing this, we’re in the 22nd year of our fantasy football league) and was challenged academically by a set of wonderful teachers to whom I owe a great deal. My relationship with my hometown was for many years complicated, as I suppose most people’s are, though as I have matured into adulthood, I have begun to appreciate the values and ethics it imbued me with.

I attended UCSB from 2009 to 2013 and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and a minor in History. My years at UCSB were an intellectual upheaval that sparked a revolution in both my self-conception and my conscience. They forever altered my trajectory in life, most tangibly in how I thought about learning, reading and education. They stopped being a means to an end and became ends in themselves.

My professional life in data started quite by accident. Upon graduating from UCSB, I had intended to matriculate into law school with the aim of working at a think tank in foreign policy or, failing that, public policy. The economy was still in the throes of the secular stagnation that followed the Great Recession and the legal market outlook was quite poor, so to bide my time I took a job at AppFolio doing business administration type work. This proved to be a fateful delay, as it quickly sparked in me the joy of using data and statistics to combat what I saw as deep procedural flaws in the operations of my team. I interviewed with the team’s VP to move into the business analyst role and demoed a few analyses I had run on team performance. I was told in no uncertain terms that I was unqualified for the role due to my lack of a degree in statistics and lack of experience in business analytics. I immediately started looking for jobs and within three months had an offer from Dish Network in Denver, Colorado. That spark of love for the Rockies that started when I was a child was finally met with good fortune and circumstance, and I have never looked back.

I advanced quickly in my career as a budding data analyst, working for Dish and then myStrength, a mental health app, and finally made my way to Daxko, where my career had its most important inflection point. COVID had disrupted the business significantly. Gyms were closed and Daxko, which makes end-to-end software for gyms, clubs and YMCAs, was scrambling to adjust. There were two rounds of layoffs, and the company’s finances were far from certain. I led the development of an analytics offering that doubled as a value-added service for our customers. Despite the financial crunch, it turned out to be quite a success for the business, and it earned my boss a promotion to Director and me a promotion to a senior title. My new boss was a former peer and colleague, and I owe a great deal of my later success to him. He pushed me more than any boss ever had, demanding greater and greater accountability, leadership and ownership. As it turned out, my newly minted title outstripped my business maturity, and things became strained between us. I eventually elected to leave. To be sure, my pride was wounded, and outwardly I felt aggrieved. However, I knew that he was right. In the weeks leading up to my new role, I spent all of my waking free time considering what my boss had been pushing me to do, and I vowed that in my next role I would rework my approach, completely reconceiving from the ground up how I thought about work.

My crisis and reconception of what professional success means will hardly be revolutionary to anyone who has seen this moment in their career come and go. It’s a classic inflection that comes as you go from junior to senior or leader. Technical proficiency, the obsession of perhaps the majority of ICs in the tech world, is in and of itself functionally useless. Learning how to write efficient code, following and instrumenting developer best practices and designing beautiful data models do very little to move the business’s bottom line toward the black or craft operational efficiencies that cut cost. It only perpetuates the constant cycle of data teams being viewed as (expensive) cost centers that produce dashboards that proliferate like rabbits and sow as much confusion as they illuminate. Only through understanding the unit economics of the business itself, living with the department heads in their world and deeply understanding their day to day, and in particular working tightly with finance to understand the P&L, do you begin to become useful to the business. I learned this at Sequoia, putting into practice what I had learned at Daxko, and through my mentorship and friendship with Colby Schrauth, who I reported to. The rest, as they say, is history.

Throughout all of this, my true fortune was in finding the greatest partner anyone could have asked for. I met my now wife in 2015. Our first date was October 3rd at Empty Bowl in Santa Barbara, three months before I moved to Denver to work for Dish. In a coincidence that is typically the province of rom-coms, she was moving to Boulder to attend graduate school. Her moving date was two weeks before mine. Our love bloomed over the following years, and we were married in Grand Teton National Park in 2021. Our love of backpacking had introduced us to the area in 2018, and we instantly knew that someday it would be where we got married. Two years later we welcomed our firstborn into our lives. I am wary of clichés. Devastatingly, all the ones about welcoming your kids into your life turn out to be true. Before having them I maintained a certain discomfiture toward kids. From the moment my son was born, it was hard to believe that life without kids was worth living. Knowing we wanted one more, we moved to Boulder in 2024, and we completed our nuclear family in 2026 with the birth of my daughter. Watching my kids play and grow up together, alongside my wife, has been the principal joy of my life ever since.