How I got here…

Freshman year of high school I started playing water polo, where I met Kevin, a junior. He took me under his wing and was helping me out of my shell. He quickly became a best friend, would pick me up for school and introduce me to new people. Late in the season he passed away in a car accident. I was beyond shattered. I ended my freshman year with a 1.67 GPA.

The next year I moved schools to a charter school and stuck to myself. I earned a 4.0 GPA. I never completed a traditional junior year because my family’s life was increasingly divided between the United States, Germany, and Sweden, and I moved to Munich.

My first stretch in Germany lasted about six months. I studied German at the Goethe-Institut and attended a German high school before returning to California. Back home I was faced with the challenge of getting my high school diploma. I either had to take two years of high school or pass the GED. I opted for the GED, easy choice.

About a year later, I went back to Germany for what was supposed to just be a four-week visit. I was offered a temporary position at a Montessori school for a couple of weeks - it went really well, and they asked me to stay for the rest of the school year. I thought, “Why not?” I spent six months in Munich working with the students and helping teach English, then returned to the United States at eighteen.

The kids probably taught me more German than I taught them English. It’s hard not to learn when you have twenty-five children talking to you and asking, “Kannst du mir mit meinen Schuhen helfen?” oder “Bist du der Schiedsrichter oder der Torwart?” Natürlich war ich immer der Torwart.

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“Can you help me with my shoes?” or “Are you the referee or the goalkeeper?” Naturally, I was always the goalkeeper.

I rebuilt and reorganized myself many times and in many places in those years. Schools changed, countries changed, languages changed, and the people around me changed. Starting over stopped feeling so dramatic because I had done it enough times to know that the uncomfortable part eventually passes. I learned to meet the situation and make the best of it, find the silver lining and hold onto it. I learned to pay attention, figure out the environment I had walked into, and find a way to learn and thrive.

Every single day became a new opportunity to make my future. I figured out that I could only control myself and how I think and what I do. So I started making my own path, and trusting it.

Back in California, I sold shoes at Robert Wayne, worked as a valet at a casino, and eventually at a resort in Coronado. From there, I found my way into banking as a part-time teller. I showed up in a collection of TJ Maxx specials that were far too large for me, but I was eager to get started. Three months later, I moved to full-time, and nine months after that I was splitting my time between the teller line and personal banking.

Working at a five-star resort had taught me what exceptional service actually looked like. It wasn't necessarily about grand gestures. Often, it was the smallest details that made someone feel genuinely taken care of. At the bank, I started noticing how much of the customer experience came down to those same small, repeatable behaviors. I brought what I'd learned into the branch, and within a relatively short period helped improve our professional-treatment score from 70% to 96%.

On paper, selling shoes, parking cars, and working behind a teller window had little in common. But each taught me something about people, how to anticipate their needs, and how much the little things matter. I discovered that I genuinely enjoyed being responsible for someone else's experience.

In 2009, I started community college, which took those instincts in several directions. An English course with Professor Jendian introduced me to Aristotle, and I became fascinated by rhetorical analysis and the way he connected persuasion, character, logic, and judgment. I read my way from the Rhetoric and the Poetics into the Nicomachean Ethics, then on to Marcus Aurelius and Plato.

What I still find fascinating is how much of modern self-help is built upon ideas these thinkers were exploring thousands of years ago. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle explored a deceptively simple question: why do we pursue the things we pursue? We work to earn money. Why? To afford a home, provide for our families, and build some security. But why do we want those things? Keep asking why, and eventually you arrive at something we pursue not as a means to something else, but for its own sake.

As Aristotle put it, "Happiness, then, is something final and self-sufficient, and is the end of action."

He called this ultimate good eudaimonia, often translated as "happiness," though "flourishing" is closer to its meaning. It wasn't simply about feeling happy, but about living well: cultivating virtue, exercising good judgment, and making something meaningful of the life we're given. Character, discipline, self-awareness, and the pursuit of a good life were hardly new discoveries. Much of what fills today's self-help shelves is ancient philosophy with a fresh cover.

I was fortunate to have time on my side to learn these kinds of things, so I followed my curiosity wherever it took me. I studied history, business law, German, marine biology, history of the Middle East, Arabic, strength and conditioning, and whatever else caught my interest. Along the way, I met some wonderful professors and developed a much broader interest in how people reason, communicate, and make decisions. I eventually earned my associate degree in German.

In 2013, I transferred to Saint Mary's College of California, where I met professors who changed the way I thought about learning itself. Two professors called me a "philosopher king," which I enjoyed considerably more than being called an idiot.

In group discussions, I often ended up getting things moving, asking questions, keeping us on track, and bringing quieter students into the conversation. I enjoyed working through difficult questions and being challenged. I became particularly attentive to students whose expressions suggested they had something to contribute but were hesitant to speak. Often they were the ones who offered an insight the rest of us had needed to hear.

My marketing professor, Kolhede, encouraged me to become a tutor. For my two years at Saint Mary's, I was the only tutor dedicated to business administration and finance, sometimes helping students through courses I was still taking myself.

Teaching changed the way I understood learning. It wasn't enough to know an answer myself. I had to understand an idea well enough to recognize where someone else was getting lost, approach it from their perspective, and explain it in a way that made sense to them. If I could help someone else use an idea, I knew I understood it.

Of course, being a tutor didn't mean I found every class easy. I was learning to adjust to the person in front of me, whether I was the one explaining or the one trying to understand.

Some of the most important parts of college happened well outside the classroom. I worked as the graphic designer for the Intercultural Center, creating materials for student programs across campus. The design work was my jam, but the real reward was becoming part of a community that brought together students from different cultures, backgrounds, and experiences. I made friendships and discovered perspectives I might never otherwise have encountered.

During the Middle Eastern Club's first year, I served as controller and helped organize Arabian Nights, our contribution to the school's Cultural Night events. Each cultural club hosted its own evening, and these were substantial productions, often drawing more than a hundred people. I helped with the planning, designed the promotional materials, worked on audio and lighting, and somehow ended up dancing in the performance too. Arabian Nights won Student Program of the Year.

I loved being involved in all of it. There was a little bit of finance, design, event production, and plenty of improvisation. I never gave much thought to whether those responsibilities belonged together. There was something we wanted to create, and I enjoyed doing whatever I could to help make it happen.

Near the end of college, an internship took me to Abu Dhabi, where the work was much closer to private equity and business development than traditional banking. I helped with the launches of Jalboot, a private ferry and water-taxi service, and a commercial laundry facility. I also conducted due diligence on a medical practice we were considering acquiring, though we ultimately decided against the investment.

Moving between cultures had long been part of my life, but Abu Dhabi offered an entirely different perspective. During my internship, I also took a finite mathematics course at the American University of Sharjah. I remember how effortlessly the professor made the material understandable. The subject wasn't necessarily easy; he was simply an exceptional teacher. He had a way of explaining concepts that made everything click, and I genuinely looked forward to his classes.

Between the people I worked with, the classroom in Sharjah, and everyday life in the Emirates, I was constantly encountering different ways of thinking, learning, and approaching problems. I loved it. I've always found that the more varied the people and perspectives around me, the more interesting life becomes.

I resigned from JPMorgan Chase as a Business Relationship Manager in 2021 after being burnt out from working relentlessly on the Paycheck Protection Program. If you were in banking during the pandemic, you are all too familiar with this program and probably shudder when you hear it spoken of. I felt a devotion to my community to work hard through it, but it took a toll on me mentally and physically. I graciously stepped down to the unknown, no plan, just rest. 8 months later I worked for a Private Equity firm, Vector Solutions, who acquired businesses and turned them into products under their umbrella - I was laid off in under a year. My life was shifting in many ways. I was reeling from the end of an eight-year relationship, I was laid off and feeling deflated, and it seemed I had nowhere to turn. I decided to do drastic things.

I spent the next two years focusing on my well-being. Relentless accountability, relentless honesty, and relentless work on myself. It wasn't linear, that's for sure. It was one of the toughest times of my life - lost, tired, defeated - but relentless. Then things started to click, but not in any glamorous way. I took a job at a coffee roaster as a warehouse associate. I packaged coffee beans alongside three other guys. The four of us were at the heart of five locations and a huge amount of online sales. I thrived. I sped things up. I was a machine. I saw and improved the inefficiencies down to the second. I recognized quickly that this is what my brain was meant to do - not packaging coffee, but improving systems.

I ended up moving too far away from the roaster, so I left. I decided to work the third shift at a grocery store distribution center that was down the street from where I was living. 10-14 hours, usually from 8 PM to 8 AM. I lifted about 10,000 pounds a day. You didn't stop until the shipments were complete. It was brutal. The efficiency was a marvel. I zipped around the warehouse on an electric pallet jack. It was pretty fun. The headset would tell me exactly where to go, always starting at the pallet stack. It would tell me which aisle to start at and when there I'd say "ready". It would reply "58, stack 10" and I'd grab 10 stacks of strawberries, then say "ready" to move on to the next pick. The routes were calculated to the second. If you beat the time, you got paid a bonus. If you were behind, well, you didn't want to be behind. This place was buzzing 24/7. It never stopped. I was amazed. That's where I learned how my brain was wired and where it thrived. But let's take a step back.

The Journey

After college I joined Bank of America as a personal banker at 50 California Street in San Francisco’s Financial District, and I loved that environment. I finished at more than 200% of target in some categories, and within nine months I was promoted to Small Business Banker, skipping the consultant role in between. My territory covered five branches in the district, with a home base at Market and New Montgomery, the West Coast flagship.

The role also changed how I thought about performance. I coached three Small Business Consultants and roughly fifteen personal bankers. I wrote calling scripts, ran role-play sessions, helped people prepare for conversations, and made myself available when someone needed help getting a client across the finish line. I was still responsible for my own number, and I wanted to crush it, but I began to understand that the more interesting problem was not how to perform well myself. It was how to create the conditions for other people to perform well: clear expectations, useful practice, timely feedback, real support, and enough trust to let someone improve. I also learned where to place my time, my most valuable resource - I needed to get a return on my investment, so I expected people to show up if I showed up for them.

In 2018 I moved to Chase as a Business Relationship Manager, at a time when San Francisco felt particularly electric. The Warriors had won multiple championships and Chase Center was taking shape in Mission Bay. My portfolio was about a hundred businesses with $3 million to $20 million in revenue. I was their primary advisor on deposits, lending, and treasury, which meant plenty of conversations with owners about cash flow and working capital. Just as often I was working with treasury specialists, credit, and operations to structure solutions that fit each business, then making sure onboarding and implementation went smoothly.

In December 2019 I transferred with Chase to San Diego and took a long-planned three-week trip through the Philippines. I got back just before the pandemic changed everything. When PPP arrived I threw myself into it. I learned the underwriting requirements, governance, and processes as fast as I could and then pushed to move requests through accurately. For stretches of time I was working sixteen-hour days, because businesses were waiting for money they needed and I felt a responsibility to move quickly without cutting corners. Eventually the pace caught up with me, and I burned out.

That brings us back to where we left off. I was still working nights at the distribution center when my aunt reached out and said she needed help. She was moving back to the house my family lived in when they immigrated to the States, in Delaware. She asked if I wanted to move out there to help her out and try out the East Coast. I thought, why not? I sold most everything, shipped a couple of boxes, and packed a few suitcases. I moved out of the room I was renting in Sacramento, stayed a couple of nights with a friend in San Francisco, then flew to Philadelphia. My idea was to go back to school. I felt that I needed to study something again and feel that sense of enlightenment and invigoration. It was October. I was planning for spring. So I needed a job. I went to Home Depot. I had a blast. I was the supervisor for the front end, the cashiers and self-checkout. Basically back to running a teller line but in a more rugged setting. I loved it. It reminded me of growing up in the warehouses. I got to interact with hard-working people and learn about their projects, which helped me to fix little things here and there at my aunt's house. All the while I was planning my return to school. What would I study?

My answer was science. I knew my brain thrived in systems and I desired to learn systems that weren't built on human objects such as money or machines. I wanted to learn what we could not alter, the building blocks of our world. I was always curious about anatomy, physiology, movement, and what the human body is capable of, so physical therapy seemed like a natural direction. It would have meant roughly five years of school, but I figured I could start with the general science requirements and see where they led me.

Just as spring was approaching, I met my wife, an acupuncturist. When she heard about the five-year physical-therapy plan, she suggested a more immediate experiment: get a massage-therapy license. She brought up good points. I would have a license that would allow me to get hands-on experience and education in a fraction of the time - and I wouldn't have to deal with insurance. I spent the next ten months doing exactly that, and it was a perfect fit. I studied everything the program required and got a great deal of hands-on experience along the way. I threw myself into the material, but this time the system was the human body.

Not too long after I finished the program and was getting my client base started, the election changed my outlook. I expected a more favorable environment for banks and a tougher one for small businesses. I was concerned about rising costs and how much room households would have for services like massage therapy. I liked the work, but I didn't like the odds of building a new practice in that environment.

I knew I had to tap into stability, and gratefully I had the experience to jump back in. Banking had that stability, but I had no interest in returning to what I'd done before. I wanted to get behind the scenes, into the operations, systems, and technology that made everything work. The health insurance didn't hurt, either.

I still put my massage therapy license to use, joining my wife as a practitioner for workshops.

Arriving

When it became clear I needed another pivot, I returned to banking strategically. At Bank of America and Chase I had always enjoyed working with the treasury specialists because they worked where clients, products, operations, and technology met. When Customers Bank opened a position in treasury operations, I went for it, and in many ways I started my career over again. I had years of banking experience, but I was stepping into a part of the business I did not yet understand deeply, and I was in a hurry to close that gap. I wanted exposure. I wanted difficult work and the responsibility that came with it. I wanted to understand how everything connected, and I wanted to become genuinely good at it.

I asked questions constantly. I volunteered for work I did not entirely know how to do yet, and I found people who understood parts of the business better than I did and asked them to teach me. I also sought mentorship from senior leaders I respected. The best of those conversations were not comfortable in the flattering sense. They exposed weaknesses I had not fully seen, helped me recognize strengths I sometimes took for granted, and gave me larger problems to think about than the ones immediately in front of me. As the problems got larger, so did my curiosity about the systems that produced them.

I started building operational platforms to solve problems I'd spent years working around. Processes moved between people, tools, and systems that didn't always work well together. Having worked on both the client-facing and operational sides of banking, I could see where things broke down. I began mapping workflows, finding inefficiencies, and building tools to connect the pieces. Individual automations grew into connected workflows, and eventually platforms that brought everything together. Processes that once took hours could now happen in seconds. The goal wasn't simply to automate work. It was to improve how the operation functioned.

AI fundamentally changed how quickly I could learn the technology needed to make that happen. A colleague introduced me to Codex. He'll tell you he barely showed me anything, but he sparked the fire. I started experimenting, building small tools, and asking a ridiculous number of questions. AI became a tutor, helping me understand unfamiliar technologies, work through architecture, and learn how different systems communicated. I wasn't interested in blindly accepting what it produced. I wanted to understand the logic, challenge the answers, and eventually know enough to build and modify things myself. Inside a bank, getting something to work is only part of the challenge. It needs to operate within the existing environment, respect security and governance requirements, and be something other people can maintain. AI helped me learn faster, but understanding the business, designing the workflows, and making those decisions remained my responsibility.

I got impatient waiting for a Salesforce workflow change to move through the development queue. I started looking for what I could build with the tools and access I already had. I designed the operational flow myself, using Power Automate to move work into trackers I built in SharePoint Lists, with Power BI dashboards updating automatically on top of them. I built the first version over a weekend, having essentially no experience with any of those tools beforehand. After enough projects like that, the question stopped being whether I already knew a particular piece of software. Give me the problem, the constraints, and the systems available, and I can learn the rest.

The more I built, the more aware I became of what I still didn't understand. Working inside a bank gave me access to powerful enterprise systems, but not necessarily to the infrastructure behind them. I didn't want limited access to become limited understanding, so I started building my own projects outside of work. They became laboratories where I could experiment with APIs, databases, data models, authentication, external services, and deployment. I could make mistakes, break things, and understand why they broke without putting anything important at risk. I wasn't trying to become an expert in every technical discipline. I wanted to recognize tradeoffs and have meaningful conversations with the engineers, architects, security teams, and product leaders who specialize in those areas. When someone I respect exposes a gap in how I think, I tend to go build something that forces me to understand it.

Today my work reaches well beyond treasury operations, into product, technology, transformation, automation, and AI. I lead complex commercial banking implementations, take on product ownership responsibilities, and work through the business and technical requirements that come with bringing new capabilities to clients. That includes work involving FISPAN, which connects business accounting systems directly to the bank, and Cashfac, which supports specialized escrow and account management capabilities. Delivering these products involves much more than technology. It requires understanding how the business operates, how people and systems interact, and what needs to change for a new capability to work in practice.

I've become increasingly interested in challenging how things are done, rather than simply improving the processes already in place. There's little value in automating a process that shouldn't exist in its current form. I've built common operating models across treasury products, developed applications, and created operational platforms that connect people, processes, and technology. But before building anything, I want to understand what we're actually trying to accomplish, why things work the way they do, and whether there's a better approach altogether.

I've heard strategy compared to building with LEGO. It's a useful analogy, but I think it oversimplifies things. LEGO assumes you have neatly manufactured pieces designed to fit together. K'NEX gives you more flexibility, but you're still working with predefined components and connections. Real businesses are far messier. Systems weren't necessarily designed to work together, resources are limited, priorities compete, and you can't always stop the operation while you rebuild it. Sometimes the pieces you need don't exist, and you have to make them yourself. Sometimes you have to rethink the entire design. And sometimes the right decision is not to build anything at all. To me, strategy is understanding what you're trying to accomplish, questioning assumptions, recognizing constraints, and making informed choices about how to get there. Transformation is taking that thinking and making it work in practice.

That same approach has led me into broader AI initiatives, including work connected to Customers Bank's strategic collaboration with OpenAI. My focus is on identifying practical opportunities, understanding the business problems behind them, and developing solutions that can move beyond prototypes into reliable capabilities. Some of the most interesting work begins with a relatively simple request that turns out to involve competing priorities, disconnected systems, and requirements that aren't obvious until you start asking questions. I enjoy working through that complexity and bringing people together to make sense of it.

AI has made this work considerably more powerful, but it has also made judgment more important. I'm interested in what AI can do, and just as interested in whether it should be doing it. Before building anything, I want to understand the existing process, the information it depends on, the risks, and what success would actually look like. Sometimes AI is the right answer. Sometimes a straightforward automation or a better process will do the job more reliably.

When AI does belong in the solution, the model is only one part of the product. I think about where its information comes from, what should be handled by deterministic logic, where human review is necessary, and what happens when it gets something wrong. In banking, these aren't theoretical questions. Permissions, data handling, testing, auditability, and accountability all matter. Getting something to work is one thing. Making it safe and dependable enough for other people to use is another.

One principle I keep coming back to is information entropy. Every time important information gets copied into another document, repository, or system, there's a chance it will drift away from the original. Eventually nobody knows which version to trust. I would rather design systems that retrieve information from authoritative sources, preserve clear ownership, and remain useful as the business changes. This is why I don't see governance as something that comes after innovation. Good governance is architecture. It allows useful ideas to move beyond demonstrations into products people can actually depend on.

I've also learned that organizations tend to scrutinize the risks of changing something more closely than the risks of leaving it alone. Familiar processes can feel safe simply because everyone has grown accustomed to their shortcomings. But maintaining the status quo is still a decision, and it carries risks of its own. That doesn't mean every new idea is worth pursuing or that change should happen without careful consideration. It means evaluating both sides of the decision. What could go wrong if we change something, and what happens if we don't? I think good strategy requires the willingness to ask both questions.

There's another part of my experience that I consider just as important as the technical knowledge I've developed. I've spent years working with people from all walks of life. I've presented to princes, refereed police officers, advised business owners, coached bankers, worked alongside warehouse crews, helped customers at Home Depot, and practiced massage therapy. Each experience taught me something different about people, what motivates them, what frustrates them, and how differently we can experience the same situation. I've developed a great deal of empathy along the way, and learned that understanding someone's perspective often reveals things that no process map or technical diagram ever could.

That perspective shapes how I work today. Much of my role happens between disciplines, where people see different parts of the same problem and bring different priorities, concerns, and expertise to the table. My job isn't simply to connect those perspectives or come up with the cleverest technical solution. It's to listen, challenge assumptions, recognize what matters to each person, and help everyone work toward something better. A system can be technically sound and still fail if it doesn't account for the people expected to use it. Understanding the technology is important, but understanding people is what makes it useful.

I'm also finding that some of the most rewarding results aren't things I build myself. A colleague introduced me to Codex and opened up an entirely new way of learning. I've since helped another colleague get started with AI and Power Automate, and he's gone on to build some seriously impressive tools of his own. I enjoy seeing people discover what they're capable of when they have the right tools, encouragement, and room to experiment. It's the same lesson I started learning years ago while coaching bankers in San Francisco. Helping other people become better at their work can have a much bigger impact than doing everything yourself.

The more I think about the work I do today, the harder it becomes to separate it from everything that came before.

Steve Jobs once said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.” In his Stanford commencement address, he described taking a calligraphy class simply because it fascinated him. There was no practical reason for it, no career plan, and certainly no expectation that it would matter years later. But when he was developing the Macintosh, that experience helped shape its typography. Something he'd learned purely out of curiosity became part of something extraordinary.

I've thought about that quote a lot because I recognize so much of my own life in it. Computers and paintball, Munich and Aristotle, banking and massage school, coffee beans and warehouse shifts, treasury and AI. Some of those experiences were deliberate choices driven by curiosity. Others came from difficult circumstances, unexpected opportunities, or simply needing to find another way forward. At the time, they often felt like entirely separate chapters of my life. I certainly wasn't following some carefully constructed plan to end up where I am today.

But each experience gave me something I didn't have before. Taking things apart taught me to experiment and question how they worked. Banking taught me to understand businesses and the people running them. The warehouses revealed how naturally my brain recognized systems and inefficiencies. Studying the human body showed me an entirely different kind of complexity. And working with people from vastly different backgrounds taught me that understanding a problem means understanding the people experiencing it, too.

I couldn't have predicted how any of those experiences would come together. I didn't even recognize some of the lessons while I was learning them. What I see now is that my interests, detours, successes, and failures weren't as disconnected as they seemed. They gradually shaped how I think, the questions I ask, the people I learn from, and how I approach problems. No single experience could have taught me all of that.

Aristotle's idea of eudaimonia became less abstract after I worked myself into exhaustion during PPP. His account of virtue as a balance between extremes gave me a way to understand what had happened: my dedication had lost its balance. Living well meant paying attention to what the work was costing me, too. The best teams I've worked with have shown me that high expectations and genuine support don't have to compete. They make each other stronger.

I know the kind of work I want to keep doing. I want to build and run businesses, products, systems, and teams that work well, where people are challenged and supported, and where technology makes them more capable without replacing their judgment. I want to be the person people count on when something is complicated, stuck, or simply not working as well as it could. I've done that inside banks, in new ventures, and through my own projects. I'd like to do more of it for other businesses, whether that means building something of my own or helping run something bigger.

The dots haven't led me to a destination. They've shaped my perspective.