When I was 19, doctors found Stage 2B Hodgkin's lymphoma. I was at
Northwestern, a theatre major, a lot more at home onstage than in an exam room. I did the
chemo and the radiation and finished school anyway. Then I moved to Los Angeles instead of
back to the East Coast, because by then playing it safe had a cost I could actually feel.
That urgency turned into a habit: find something worth building and get there before the
rest of the room notices. It runs through everything in the log below, from
Hulu's early years to the interim CEO seat at SuperBam.
I went to Northwestern to be an actor. I don't mention it to be charming. It's half of how
I work. Four years of theatre and improv is four years of training in reading a room: who
has stopped talking, what the scene is actually about underneath the words everyone agreed
to say, when to hold a beat instead of filling it. I spent the next twenty years
inside things as they scaled, paying attention to which decisions made people money
and which ones quietly cost them. The useful part is having both.
Plenty of operators can read a P&L. Fewer can tell you what the room isn't saying while you read it.
The through-line has been a read on systems: which ones were about to break open, and which
ones needed someone to care more carefully than the people already in charge.
I think in stories before slides. That frustrates the people who want a
deck before they'll engage with the problem. It works on everyone else.
In April 2025 I moved the family to the south of France. We bet that the life we'd been
optimizing for in LA wasn't the one we actually wanted. I write, advise, and build from
here now. Two kids who think a Tuesday market is normal are the best evidence it's working.
