How I got here
Navy → Meraki → Nomad → this.
Six years in the Navy
I started as a Surface Warfare Officer out of the Naval Academy. Six years at sea, 20+ countries, leading teams of 200+. Ended as Chief of Staff to a two-star admiral — living in Bahrain, running programs that had to work the first time because the next watch was counting on them.
Cisco Meraki — building tools for the teams building the product
I joined Cisco Meraki in 2017 as a Technical Program Manager and stayed four years, eventually running Strategic Data Projects. The job was "the Next Generation Operating Model for Meraki" — building the internal tools used by the product, design, engineering, and operations teams day to day. I also ran the Executive MBA at Wharton (Business Analytics + Marketing/Ops, Director's List) during those same years. The biggest lesson: leverage comes from giving the people already doing the work better tools to do it with.
Nomad Hospitality — two families, 80+ doors
In 2021 my wife Kass and I teamed up with another couple — Jered and Carly — to start Nomad Hospitality in Jacksonville Beach. Today it's 80+ active short-term rental doors (30 more in renovation) plus 70 long-term doors, part of Nomad Capital Ventures: a vertically integrated group with hospitality, realty, design/construction, and asset-management arms. We built the business we wanted to operate.
Sherpa Data
Running 80 doors surfaced the same spreadsheet problem I'd been solving for engineering teams at Meraki — the tools exist, but not for us. Enterprise PMS pricing, owner reports that took Sunday nights, market data sold like an enterprise contract. So in April 2024 I started building what Nomad needed, one module at a time. Other operators saw it and asked if they could use it. Sherpa Data is what came out of that.
