Talk To Me About

The common thread in what I chase isn’t a technology, it’s change. What pulls me in is the moment an industry’s default way of operating starts to break down, usually before it’s obvious. Right now AI is widening the aperture of nearly every industry at once, moving horizontally across functions like security, finance, and operations, and vertically down into the specific workflows of individual industries. That dual movement is where I spend most of my energy, because it’s where genuinely new companies get built.

My eye for it comes from watching risk up close. I spent five years at Palo Alto Networks selling into Fortune 500 security teams, observing leaders decide what to actually deploy versus what became shelfware. That taught me to probe the unglamorous parts of a pitch: who really signs off, what has to be torn out to get in, whether the product holds together once it leaves the tidy world of a design partner. I would rather a founder tell me their customer’s current fix is a spreadsheet and sheer stubbornness than dress the pain up as something it isn’t.

Some questions I’m especially interested in right now:

1. As software starts acting on its own, who is allowed to act, under what conditions, and who is accountable when it goes wrong?
2. As companies adopt new technology faster than ever, how do they keep pace with their ability to see and manage what they’ve taken on?
3. When the software stack goes AI-native, what has to be rebuilt around it, from how it’s secured and governed to who the incumbents even are?

Backstory

I’ve always been drawn to beginnings, the first pages of a book, the first weeks of a company. I grew up in a quieter Palo Alto than the one people picture now and absorbed its default optimism, the belief that if something didn’t exist yet, someone could simply build it. Boarding school in New England taught me the opposite instinct, to value what has already stood the test of time. I’ve been balancing the two ever since. That balance is part of what drew me to study U.S. History at Princeton, a subject that reads to me like a study of ambition: people reaching for something larger than themselves while navigating uncertainty, timing, ego, and luck.

After college I joined Palo Alto Networks in enterprise sales and spent five years helping some of the world’s largest organizations navigate complex security challenges. It was an education in technology, but even more in people. I found myself increasingly fascinated by the companies trying to solve my customers’ problems, and then by the founders building them. When I started exploring venture, I didn’t begin with rankings; I called the people whose judgment I trusted and asked who they’d want to learn from. Jump’s name kept coming up, and in its portfolio I recognized problems I’d spent years discussing with customers, only now from the investor’s seat.

Outside of work, I try to get out on the water as often as I can. I’ve been sailing since I was a kid, competitively in college, and now in New York Harbor whenever I get the chance. It’s a decent metaphor for the job: you’re always working with incomplete information, the conditions never stop shifting, and what it rewards is paying close attention, staying curious, and adjusting the moment they do.