My Story

I've been through three acquisitions—always as the person who built the thing that got bought.

Escape Restaurant Group. Salad Pangea. Good Uncle.

Each time: join early or found it, build the operations, scale it, exit.

It's not a strategy I planned. It's just what happens when you build something that works.

When we started Good Uncle, no delivery vehicle existed that could do what we needed: keep 500 meals refrigerated during loading, then cook 150 of them while driving to customers.

So I designed one.

I led a 3-month engineering sprint with electrical engineers. We built a 24.8 kWh lithium-ion battery system powering a 12KW inverter, integrated ThermoKing refrigeration with Amana convection ovens, and added Victron cloud monitoring for real-time thermal management.

The system was platform-agnostic—we deployed on both Mercedes-Benz Sprinters and Dodge ProMasters depending on unit availability. We manufactured 50 of these vehicles. Each was a mobile kitchen serving 150+ customers per shift without any on-site food prep.

It wasn't just operations—it was product development at the intersection of hardware, software, and logistics.

In 2024, I faced a choice: continue running a 150-person delivery operation, or transform the business model entirely.

I chose transformation.

I partnered with a top-tier manufacturer and distributor, leveraging Aramark's relationships to handle production and logistics. Then I replaced our internal design, marketing, and operations functions with AI personas trained on our historical data.

The result: a 2-person organization running a $5M CPG business with 60% growth. Same product, better quality, fraction of the cost.

At age 10, I sold gumballs on the school bus for $0.50 a bag. Within 30 days, I had built a distribution network—classmates became wholesalers, each bus a market—and generated over $1,200 in revenue.

Then the principal forced me to return every penny.

The lesson: failure can be outside your control. Build anyway.