About
about me
- -I build companies. I’ve started them, sold one, raised venture capital for others, and helped allocate it from the investing side of the table.
- -I’m from New Jersey. I have a BS from the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
- -I started in the institutional world: big-data and cloud work at BASF, Accenture, Booz Allen, and EY, building for Fortune 500s and federal agencies like the FDA and the Treasury.
- -I founded Riverblock, a Bitcoin-mining analytics company, and sold it to the private equity firm Industry Capital in 2019. I stayed on the investing side there for a few years after.
- -I co-founded Arcade, the first platform for lending against NFTs. We raised over $15M from Pantera, Franklin Templeton, and Castle Island, moved more than $300M in loans, and grew to twenty people. I came in as COO and became CEO.
- -Today I’m building Dealport, using AI to make buying and selling small businesses faster.
- -I still write code. I think founders who can build give something up when they stop.
- -I live in New York. I own more synthesizers and drum machines than I can justify.
some things I believe
- -The best operators are generalists. The interesting problems never respect the org chart.
- -Most of what you learn as a founder, you can’t learn as an employee: the structuring, the disputes, the calls you make with real money on the line and no one to ask.
- -Building where there’s no map is a skill, not a personality trait. I did it through a full crypto cycle, when the rules were still being written.
- -Most “boring” industries are just under-tooled. That’s the bet behind Dealport.
- -Give a capable generalist real resources and get out of the way.