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Brief Biography

Upbringing

I was born in rural northeastern Connecticut in the late 80’s to a chemical engineer father and a fine artist mother, the middle child between two sisters. I was homeschooled, surrounded by 40 square miles of woods, with abundant access to art, crafts, legos, books ranging from history to science to science fiction to fantasy and literature, and the freedom to create and explore my own unique perspective on reality. My evangelical Christian parents divorced and remarried. I began attending public school in middle school, which I experienced as a constrictive and regressively programmed institution. I continued to explore interests in history, politics, justice, investigation, creative writing, science fiction, geography, architecture, physics, and technology from childhood into higher education.

Education

I attended Carnegie Mellon University (ranked #22 in the U.S.) in Pittsburgh, earning a Bachelor of Science in Policy & Management, a major in the Social and Decision Sciences. This program is focused on applied decision making and organizational behavior. I specifically focused my studies on innovation processes, institutional change, and entrepreneurship and was few courses shy of a minor in Business at the Tepper School of Business (their MBA is consistently ranked in the mid teens nationally) focused on new venture creation and startup entrepreneurship.

I faced challenges including severe anxiety, chronic health issues, financial scarcity, family health and social difficulties in my teens and twenties that impacted my performance and whole health. Throughout my coursework, I began taking classes focused on entrepreneurship and startups and founded my first startup in 2011 (It failed! Fun fact: the true failure rate for startups is well upward of 90%, and may actually be closer to 99%).

I became interested in entrepreneurial innovation and emerging technologies because, as a civic innovator seeking to make the world a better place, it looked to be the most effective applied strategy to engage in systems change.

Clarity of Purpose

I chose to pursue this career with strong activism-rooted values, rational purpose-driven motivations as a changemaker, and ethical boundaries that dictated that anything I would say yes to doing or being paid for had to be in alignment with and contributing to my personal mission to:

a. Solve the crisis created by chronic dysfunctional behavior and self-destructive decision making in humanity and the maladaptive design of human civilizational systems

and

b. Create a far better world where all the awesome science fiction possibilities of our utopian dreams become a beautiful reality through consent-based governance and collaboration

Professional Experience

I worked as a freelance operations consultant directly out of university while developing the business strategy and technical systems design of a stealth startup within the AI, data science, social media, and knowledge management space. This led me into exploring the need for distributed technology frameworks, protocols, and platforms that would empower web3 and evolutionary apps returning power to the users. I relocated to San Francisco in 2017, when I joined the Holochain team as a first hire and worked in business strategy, operations, and design on a yet-to-launch blockchain-alternative distributed computing framework that succeeded at a multimillion dollar Kickstarter campaign as well as a $25 million dollar ICO in 2018.

In subsequent years, I worked on additional emerging technology projects at the bleeding edge of technology and systems change in roles such as operations director and collaborative systems designer. I continued to develop a novel theory of change and framework for decentralized, distributed, and ethically grounded collaborative entrepreneurship, cryptoeconomy and cryptogovernance. I also developed various models for systems thinking and applied decision science into an approach to timeline strategy and implementing civilizational metasolutions.

During this period, I was involved in projects in roles like: designing alternative organizational structures for employee owned startups and agencies, product design and user experience design research for a collaborative web bookmark and annotation tool, political strategist for a primary campaign challenge against Nancy Pelosi on a digital democracy policy platform, and the project manager and whole system designer for a regenerative village and farm project where I lived for a year during the pandemic.

OpenCivics: Restoring Civic Collaboration & Redesigning Civilizational Systems

In late 2019, I initially formulated and proposed the core tenets of my current primary service-to-humanity project, OpenCivics. OpenCivics integrates my work as a collaborative protocol pioneer, civilizational systems designer, and on specific methodologies for systems change into a civic innovation network for the public good. OpenCivics was initiated as a DAO between me and my two brilliant co-founders, Benjamin Life and Patricia Parkinson, in 2023. It nears launch as a participatory membership association and collaborative consortium of projects, organizations, and institutions working together to better our future, resolve the metacrisis, propose metasolutions, and intervene in human history through converging to build civic metaprojects.

Going Deeper

This mission of systems change also drove me to further develop personal capability and proficiency in a variety of skill sets and knowledges in online entrepreneurship as I prepare to launch an online presence as a commentator, deep generalist, public intellectual, and consciousness adept as well as a thought leader in systems change. In order to publish, launch, advocate for, and implement my various works, I have done deep applied research into online entrepreneurship, influencer marketing, business models and growth tactics to build my approach. That is not the only edge that I have pushed in order to fulfill my role as a leader.

Over the last half decade, my mission has also taken me deeper within. What I learned both from coaching startups, counseling leaders, and managing and leading teams is that it is the inner psychological dysfunctions within collaborators that form the limits of their success as teams. As I pursued my own entrepreneurship and life journey, engaging in deep relationships and connection with other humans and community, I recognized a pattern. I continued to see that organizational behavior is preceded by individual behavior, and individual behavior is derived from the overall true health of the human being. This health is the limiting factor on individual success and actualization as a person here on earth to consciously work in service to others.