From Kansas City
to the capital seat,
told in six chapters.

I grew up in Kansas City and was educated by the Jesuits — discipline, plus the sense that the world was bigger than what I could see out the window. I graduated from Santa Clara University in 1999 with a B.S. in Mathematics, choosing the discipline because, even at eighteen, I understood real option value before I had the vocabulary for it. That door led to San Francisco and to finance: my first seat was at Silicon Valley Bank, tailoring working capital for early-stage companies and stewarding a $25M loan portfolio through the dotcom bust with a loss ratio 2.2× better than the department average. While there, I earned an M.S. in Economics from Golden Gate University (2001), nights and weekends.

M&A at Ridgecrest Capital Partners taught me the buyer's mind — acquirer landscapes, merger models, the pitch that wins the mandate. Leading equity research at Tier1 Research taught me how investors actually listen: I launched coverage, authored industry-first work on unit economics, and my long/short calls returned 59% annualized — credibility built on being right, not loud. Then I hung my own shingle, serving as fractional finance partner to more than twenty growth companies — building the plans, the models, and above all the investor narratives that carried them through fundraises and exits. The pattern I kept seeing: the stories that raise capital are always three things — clear, compelling, and credible.

Teaching has been the throughline. At the Investment Banking Institute I launched the San Francisco location and taught finance to analysts and associates; at iXperience I taught students in Cape Town and online. Every class demanded the same skill capital raising demands: take something complex — a credit structure, a valuation, a fund's thesis — and make a smart, skeptical audience believe it because they understand it. That is the skill of the offering memorandum, the LP update, and the first meeting with a family office.