Who am I?

Who am I and why are we here?

That’s a great question… and one of the reasons I’ve resisted blogging for so long.

The first part is easy.   I’m a recovering consultant turned serial entrepreneur, startup mentor and early stage investor. I began my career at Booz & Co consulting on strategy and operations for Fortune 100 clients. After a brief stint at Kaplan helping transition their traditional classroom test prep services into online products, I joined Bunk1.com as COO where I spent eight years building it from scratch to the leading provider of web services to the summer camp industry. After being bought out of Bunk1 in 2008, I managed a family office where I was responsible for both incubating new ventures and for managing over $50M of alternative assets including hedge, private equity, and venture capital funds as well as a number of direct investments in private companies. I then took another turn on the startup side of the table as the founding CEO of Layercake.com. Along the way I started angel investing and then, in 2014, I joined Dreamit as the Managing Director of the NY office before helping build Dreamit’s new, later stage accelerator platform and launching its Edtech and then its Urbantech verticals. I have looked at literally thousands of startups and mentored hundreds of entrepreneurs.

What my resume means is that I’ve spent most of my professional life trying to understand how businesses, both large and small, work and I have a deep appreciation for how hard it is to build a successful startup, even under the best of circumstances. Less obviously, I have picked up some keen insights on how to build investing platforms – VC, CVC, accelerator, venture studio, etc – that are effective, differentiated, and advantaged.

The second part of the question is for you to answer. Do you like what you see? Do you agree? Disagree? Violently disagree?! Let me know.