About

Hello!

In 2011, I moved to Detroit from San Francisco to create a legacy. I'm proud to be one of the leaders of Detroit’s startup renaissance.

I am an entrepreneur at heart. I enjoy building things and helping people. I consider myself a blue collar type of startup investor: I'm happy to roll up my sleeves and get to work.

Last trip to Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco with my wife Katie

Startup Investor

I am the Managing Director of Techstars Mobility, the first US startup accelerator program focused on emerging mobility technologies. Previously, I was a Partner and founding team member of Detroit Venture Partners, a $55M seed-stage fund that invested in 25 companies.

Hanging out at the M@dison Building, in Detroit

Detroit Community Builder

I'm also a big community supporter. I sit on the board of the Michigan Venture Capital Association, board of Techtown Detroit, and am the Midwest Regional Advisor for Venture for America. I also was the founding Chairman of the Detroit Executive Advisory Board of Techweek, an event I brought to Detroit in May 2014. This event attracted 2000 attendees in its inaugural year as the largest startup tech event in Detroit.

Startup Co-founder & Open Source Developer

I began my startup career as a co-founder and CTO of ParentsClick. With the 4th largest social network for moms and the largest blog network for moms, Lifetime Television acquired us in 2008, 52 days before the market crash!

I owe much of my website building know-how to the open source project Drupal. For over 7 years, I developed and contributed over 1000 code patches to the Drupal project. I also was an early pioneer building enterprise-grade Drupal websites for Fortune 500 clients, including Sony, MTV, and Lifetime Television.

I started my engineering career after I graduated from Cornell University in 2004 with a B.S. in Computer Engineering.

Husband and Father

The only thing constant in a startup is change. I learned this first hand growing up in a military family and moving around every 3 years.

And now I’m starting my own family in Metro Detroit. I'm married to a beautiful girl and we had our first son, Joey, in 2013. I’m active in my local community as a 3rd degree Knight of Columbus. I’m also a silver palmed Eagle Scout.

In the evenings you can find me enjoying a great glass of scotch or wine.

On the dock of our favorite restaurant in the most beautiful place in America

Elsewhere Online

Twitter, Angel.co, Google+, LinkedIn, Github, Drupal.

You can also email me.