I'm married to the most amazing and beautiful woman, and we have two awesome kiddos and two dogs. We live in Denver right next to the mountains with a short walk to a beautiful lake. We have lots of soccer, dance, and horseback riding activities and we love every minute of it.
Born in St. Louis, MO
As a kid I loved playing in the woods, riding my bide, basically anything outside. I also loved video games, and playing the piano and guitar. Every summer I was on the swim team (Yay! Rah rah! Green Trails!) and played just about every team sport--at least for a season or two.
High school at Chaminade Preparatory School--because that's the first question anyone from St. Louis is asked, still not sure why
Undergrad in Computer Engineering at the University of Denver (aka DU). Most of the people I hang out with to this day I met at DU. Going to DU was one of the best decisions of my life. Some of the best advice I ever got was from a high school friend who told me just before I left for college to "be yourself" and "you are in control of your happiness." I took that advice and ran with it and it made all the difference. I decided to say "hi", introduce myself, and learn and remember everyone's name that I met. I realized that people love to be seen, and that by taking an interest in others it was easy to make friends.
Grad - MBA at Daniels College of Business, DU. Sophomore year Computer Engineering had a brutal amount of work and I wasn't really enjoying it, so when I started Junior year I decided to sign up for the 3:2 program. This allowed me to add MBA classes and complete my engineering undergrad and mba grad in 5 years. This opened some pretty awesome doors.
Lead Guitarist for Three Degrees of Freedom - toured the country from 2001-2003 and played about 300 shows. I got to practice the guitar every day! When we first started, the shows were about 45mins so we played them as written. But as we got more shows, they got longer and pretty quickly we were playing 3-4hrs each night. The lead singer told the band that his voice couldn't handle that much so we needed to add more instrumental music. This is when I learned how to improvise.
Substitute Teacher at Denver Public Schools - when the band broke up, I got started substitute teaching. My favorite ages were kindergarten through 2nd grade... love those kids! My favorite memory was teaching music class for a week and creating Musical Staff Twister. 5 lines of blue masking tape on the ground and voila a fun game. A little light memorization of FACE and Every Good Boy Does Fine, and within one day just about every kid in every grade knew the treble clef well enough to play twister. We played it all week! Super fun!
Loan Associate at Household Finance (aka HFC) - my job was to convince people that it was a good idea to refinance their home in 2004-5, just before the housing market bubble crashed. Getting people approved was not hard. I learned a lot about cold sales and hitting weekly quotas. This was my first regular paycheck post college so I was thankful for the job.
Project Manager at Equity Marketing Services in Chicago - this was the real deal. I got a real solid corporate job working in the big city, learning all about real estate sales and marketing for a real estate broker that specialized in high rise condominiums. This is also where I starting working as a Project Manager, which I still do to this day. My first week on the job we did a Grand Opening of a 450 unit building in River North. People were lined up out the door over night the night before we opened. We sold most of the condo units the first day. That was 2005 and we felt like geniuses. I learned a ton at that job and I stuck with it all the way through the housing crash and into 2011 when it was time to move back to Denver for personal reasons.
Trader at Rowan Financial Capital in 2011-2012 where I traded Eurodollars 12hrs/day for about a year and a half. Easily the most stressful job I've ever had, but also the most fun because I was working side by side with one of my best buds.
IT Project Manager at Wall Street on Demand, aka Markit on Demand, aka Markit Digital (we went through a few name changes while I was there). Super cool company that basically runs the backend for many of the financial institutions out there like Scottrade, TRowe, Pershing, Merrill, etc. If you are looking at stock quotes on one of their websites, you are looking at data that is coming from Markit Digital. I interviewed here on 12/12/12 and I learned a lot here about a variety of technologies. I also learned that I was playing in a corporate game and I didn't really know the rules.
Owner at Uplaunch Consulting from 2016 - 2021. I got my PMP certification, quit my job at Markit Digital, and started up my own company knowing that there were opportunities out there to serve customers while having a bit more control over my own destiny. I worked on a variety of awesome client accounts, most notably with the San Diego Zoo where I help them install a new POS system across the Zoo and Safari Park, and at Vail Resorts where I helped them integrate their ecomm systems w/ Inntopia, onboard Whistler Blackcomb into the Vail technical ecosystem, launch multiple new ski resort websites, upgrade the military verification system for pass discounts, and build and launch the ski pass reservations system that became necessary due to covid.
Project Manager at Mapleton Hill in Boulder. Covid hit right as I was expanding my business at Uplaunch to provide staff augmentation services. Basically, I had interviewed about 100 project managers and was leveraging my contacts to find and staff great project managers for their projects. I had some success with this, but timing with covid was tough. So, I went looking for a company that I could get back to doing great work serving clients. I found Mapleton Hill where the owners and I share a surprising amount of backstory, though our paths hadn't crossed until now. I'm currently working with Alterra Mountain Co to help manage their resort websites (Steamboat, Winter Park, Deer Valley, etc) on Sitecore. We finished up an exciting project at the end of 2022 where we moved Mammoth onto the latest and greatest infrastructure--jamstack headless with Sitecore on the backend and NextJS/React/TypeScript on the frontend. We are currently migrating all the sites over to this tech stack and also working on an exciting Design System project on Storybook/Figma. I get to work with some seriously smart people, and have had the pleasure of working with a team in Ukraine as they have been going through the war. I am amazed and inspired daily by this team of beautiful people. Looking forward to lots more exciting projects!