Team.

I'm an engineer by training. I studied systems science at UC San Diego and earned two graduate degrees in aerospace engineering at Stanford, where my thesis focused on the stability of large space antennas. I spent 5 years at Lockheed in engineering and engineering management positions working on guidance and control systems for airplanes and spacecraft. After Harvard Business School, I made a choice that confused my classmates: instead of consulting or banking, I took a sales job at Sun Microsystems. Selling technical computing as an engineer taught me the power of a salesperson in love with the product they sell. I was a CAD guy, selling CAD systems to CAD engineers. Heaven!

That combination led to Scopus Technology, which I co-founded with four exceptionally smart people. Lesson learned: surround yourself with people smarter than you, and good things can happen. In seven years, we grew from a five-person startup to a Morgan Stanley-led IPO and were eventually acquired by Siebel Systems. When we founded the company, most people didn't even know the term CRM. A year later, CRM became a wave. Scopus taught me that luck matters, but you must be smart enough to recognize it.

I started my venture career at Sierra Ventures, where I helped build the enterprise software practice and created a CIO Advisory Board of 75 Fortune 500 CIOs. Sitting with those CIOs, I kept hearing the same complaint: expensive horizontal platforms that never solved their industry-specific problems. In 2014, I founded Vertical Venture Partners to back the companies that are dedicated to fully solving these industry-specific pain points.

That is still all we do.

I met Dave a few months into the firm's existence and joined full-time in early 2016, after a year as a venture partner. In the beginning, I thought our edge was the mix of our backgrounds and the decision to go all-in on verticals (unfashionable at the time). A year in, I realized it was our working relationship. Big VC firms are like machines. We are more like a band. Every investment is a collaboration, we don't have deal attribution, and success and failure are collectively owned. Any investment that works is because of the founder, not us, and there is always some amount of luck in it.

I started my career on Wall Street. Six years at Jefferies in New York, in the Financial Sponsors and Healthcare groups, which was probably five too many. I left to co-found an ecommerce company, put in both sweat and real equity, and was humbled. On paper, business school would have been the smarter move. What I took instead was empathy for the founder. After that and before VVP, I was leading early and growth-stage deals alongside multiple family offices.

I spend most of my time on the industries technology reached last, or neglected entirely. I don't care whether you are selling a product, a service, or an actual outcome. AI is redefining what is possible and making business models work that have historically been out of favor. I am direct with founders because I think that is a form of respect. Blowing smoke, staying vague, and falling back on VC platitudes do nobody any good.

I also build and run the AI systems the firm operates on. Sourcing, diligence, portfolio intelligence, and research all move through infrastructure I architected and we use daily. It means when we underwrite an AI company, I am not evaluating the category from the outside.

I grew up in Michigan and have lived in Florida, Rhode Island, Copenhagen, New York, LA, Palo Alto, and Sonoma. I now live in Solana Beach with my wife and our two boys, and run our San Diego office. New York is the only place I miss. My wife jokes that I collect hobbies. Squash was the first and the most serious. I was a competitive US junior and played at Brown. Skateboarding, photography, boxing, golf, running, cycling, food, and wine have all been in the rotation at some point. Skiing with my family is my favorite thing in the world. I am working up the courage to learn how to surf.

If you are interested in the companies I work with, my LinkedIn profile is here.

I never aspired to be a venture capitalist. I'm a builder, entrepreneur, and founder to my core: six years at Los Alamos National Labs modeling high-explosive materials, then two companies of my own, BrightScale in massively parallel microprocessors and Appfluent Technology in enterprise database software.

I got into venture in 2007, when I jumped at the chance to work with someone way smarter than me, an investor I had known since my founding days. Venture turned out to be the best platform to leverage everything I had built. At VVP I lead our deep tech practice, backing founders who commercialize technology coming out of major research universities and aim it at a specific industry's hardest problems.

What I look for is a founder with a genuinely new insight into a hard problem worth solving. My investment is not in the plan but the person: a particular set of experiences, insights, and character traits, the kind I want to back for the arc of a career. All entrepreneurs are fundamentally serial entrepreneurs.

I studied computer science at Chapman and started my career at Acorns, the consumer fintech app, before going back for an MBA in data analytics and joining VVP during the program. I've worn most of the hats here at some point; the one that stuck is deal sourcing.

Most venture networks sit in the Bay Area. I spend my time building deal flow outside that gravity well: Southern California, the Mountain West, and other geographies where domain-expert founders are quietly putting vertical AI companies into market.