The long way around.
In 2019, the Washington Business Journal named me one of DC's 40 Under 40. I keep that in perspective: it was an acknowledgment of a path that started with a psychology degree, no connections, and a door-to-door sales job during the worst economy in a generation.
That's the part that doesn't show up in the press release. I graduated into the recession — no job offers, no obvious next step. Door-to-door sales was humbling in exactly the way you'd expect, and exactly the way I needed. It taught me something that stuck: you don't need a warm introduction, you need a good pitch and enough discipline to make the next call. I've been living off that lesson ever since.
From there, commercial real estate. I joined JBG Companies in DC and became their youngest VP — not by having the right last name, but by working on place-making projects that actually mattered to neighborhoods. North End Shaw was one of them: helping transform a stretch of DC into a real destination, attracting tenants like Warby Parker and Aesop. The New York Times noticed. That's when I understood that real estate, done right, is really about building community.
I eventually founded District Equities — my own brokerage. Liquidated my 401k to do it. Lived in a group home to keep overhead down. You do what you have to do. Along the way I got deep into food halls through a joint venture with Urbanspace, which led me to Andy's Pizza and Thip Khao — some of DC's best food. I learned what it actually takes to run physical businesses at volume: the unglamorous stuff, the staffing, the margins, the machines that break at 7pm on a Friday.
The dog industry found me next — and I got obsessed. Not just with dogs, but with the business model. In 2025 I launched Molly's Dog Care, a premium dog daycare franchise designed from day one to scale nationally. Then I acquired Puppy Playground, a 30-year-old American manufacturer that's outfitted over 12,000 facilities worldwide.
Now I'm layering AI on top of all of it — not as a side project or a thought leadership angle, but because I'm running live systems across two real businesses and I'm genuinely impressed by what's possible when operators, not just technologists, are at the controls.