About
I got my first "adult" job in media at 19, when Woody Paige (Denver Post columnist, professional arguer on ESPN's Around the Horn) hired me to run his website. We launched it, gave it everything we had, and it died about a year later. I maintain this was a valuable education. Mostly in what happens to websites run by 19-year-olds.
Next came PR for the Denver Broncos, a job that sounds glamorous and mostly involved collecting quotes from enormous men in towels. This was peak Peyton Manning, 55-touchdown-season Peyton Manning, so the football was spectacular. The quotes were not. After your hundredth "we just take it one game at a time," you start doing some math on how you'd like to spend your life. I loved sports. I just didn't want to spend mine transcribing them.
Barcelona, for sound financial reasons
I graduated with a negative net worth. I'd paid my own way through college, and at some point I did the liberating math: if your net worth is already negative, making it slightly more negative is a rounding error. So I spun a globe, stopped my finger near Barcelona, ran a rigorous diligence process (beach: yes, warm: yes, fun: reportedly), and bought a one-way ticket. I taught English to pay rent.
Barcelona is also where my career accidentally got serious. I met a founder there starting an advertising technology company and joined him. That kicked off chapter two: a decade in adtech, most of it building an online video platform for publishers that grew into a nine-figure business. Our clients ranged from the biggest media conglomerates in the world down to local newsrooms in towns you've driven through without noticing.
The small newsrooms were the part I cared about most. My parents were both local journalists, so "local news is dying" was never an abstraction. I structured deals that got local publishers the same premium video technology the giants used, at better revenue shares and better ad rates. Money that went back into reporting. It felt good, but it was a little like showing up to a house fire with a really nice bucket. Helpful. Not the thing that puts the fire out.
Water
The company I'm building now hasn't launched yet, so I'll describe the problem instead of the company. I went looking for a water filter pitcher that wasn't made of plastic and didn't run on filtration technology old enough to rent a car. It didn't exist. The pitcher you're picturing right now has barely changed in decades: a legacy loose-carbon filter, plastic housing, your "clean" water sitting in plastic that leaches into it, a flimsy lid that breaks. The whole nine. Meanwhile the stuff actually in our water (disinfection byproducts, microplastics, PFAS, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, heavy metals, etc.) has gotten considerably more ambitious and shows up in nearly every municipal water supply across the country. And it's not like we're slowing down on the plastics, chemicals, or pesticides.
There's also the other end of the plastic problem. I'm a sucker for animals, and at some point you see one too many photos of a sea turtle wearing a six-pack ring as a necklace, and the plastic in your kitchen stops looking so innocent.
So I'm building the thing I wanted to buy: glass and stainless steel, modern filtration, water that isn't marinating in plastic, and a lot less plastic headed for the ocean on the way. A better mousetrap, for the most consumed substance on earth.
Where this is going
Sports, adtech, water. It took me three chapters to figure out what I actually want to do with my life, and it turned out to be simple to say: do well by doing good. Build products that genuinely help people live healthier, happier lives and are a delight to use. Leave the world a little better than I found it.
Water is the starting point because it's the highest-impact problem I could find. Every person on earth drinks it, every day, more than they consume anything else — and the products standing between people and their water aren't close to good enough. After water, I hope to solve more problems like it. That's the plan for the rest of my life.
If any of this sounds like your kind of thing — building, helping people, being annoyed at plastic — feel free to reach out.
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