I was the kid in the 90s who cared more than anyone else in the room about how a movie actually sounded. A 5.1 system, amplification, where the speakers sat, all of it, long before I could explain why it mattered to me. Matter of fact, I think my father and grandfather cared just as much as I did. By my teens I'd moved on to taking apart my first PC, adding some additional part to it just to see if I could put it back together better than it came.
That instinct came from a blue-collar family on Long Island, and from two parents who gave me a work ethic that still shapes how I operate today. Whatever I've built since, that was the foundation.
At Penn State I learned to find patterns in data, which became the basis for how I'd later read markets, products, and opportunities. My first two jobs while in school: stocking shelves for a beer distributor, where I started to really understand people and their patterns, and making collection calls during the 2008 recession, where talking to people in real financial trouble taught me more about the psychology of money than any class could, how people get trapped by debt, what fear does to a decision, why some people find a way through while others stay stuck.
From there I moved into payments in 2011. In the years since, I've consolidated six competing products into a single platform serving nearly millions of users, turned around underperforming ones that were losing ground, and built new ones the market didn't have yet. I've also raised, structured, and syndicated real estate deals, working as both a capital and operating partner.
I still love building anything I can get my hands on such as engines, replacing bearings and transmissions, home and car audio, and now a self-hosted home server, the newest version of a habit that started with that first PC.
The gym has been the clearest place to prove it to myself. Thirteen years of consistent training, pushing my body and mind past what I thought was possible, then doing it again once that becomes normal. Most people want the outcome. Few are willing to put in the work that actually gets you there.
Pushing myself is one thing. Helping push someone else to achieve their goals and aspirations is another. I live for those "I got it" moments, and for watching someone finally accomplish what they set out to do. Now I find myself sharing my experiences through career advice and progression, training, business, tech, and more.
These days, all of it comes out through How I See It, where I share my perspective on technology, business, and everything else. It started with a pandemic that made me question what I was really giving up for convenience, and how much of it was privacy I wasn't tracking. The self-hosted home server is where that turned into something real: questioning what cloud storage actually was, whether I needed it, and realizing I could just build it myself instead of renting access to it. The full story, and the belief that came out of it, lives on the manifesto.