bio

I grew up in a sleepy Connecticut hamlet called Simsbury, the Platonic ideal of a New England small town. A river runs through its center and the hills turn bright orange in fall. Just south of Massachusetts, its residents have a Bostonian taste for Dunkin’ coffee and Patriots football.

I dabbled in a bunch of extracurriculars, but Boy Scouts was the most impactful. At the peak of my involvement, I was leaving home almost every weekend to explore a new corner of the Northeast. Together with my best friends, I spent my youth conquering regional high points and seeing whether I could survive the weekend with nothing but the clothes on my back. I developed a love for the outdoors, leadership, self-sufficiency, and problem-solving.

In high school, I took up running. I wasn't particularly talented, but I liked the mental challenge and the camaraderie of the team. I made Cross Country Captain my senior year.

During the summers, I worked as a camp counselor at a local farm. The staff was close. After work, we would cool off at a rope swing we hung by the river, or pile into my Jeep and go off-roading.

It was a good childhood — the quintessential American boyhood. Very Huck Finn.

I was always very driven and did well in school. When it was time for college, I chose William & Mary. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, but politics was one interest and W&M had a good political science program. To keep my options open, I double majored in Economics and Government. I studied very little, but managed decent grades by cramming. I spent most of the rest of my time on my fraternity, which advanced my (immature, mildly hedonistic) goals at that age even if I don’t consider it terribly productive in retrospect.

Graduation came and I was still searching for a calling. I was fiercely ambitious, but my energy was unfocused because I lacked a clear definition of success. Ever prone to defining it in terms of others, I looked around to see what my smartest peers were doing. Everyone in my mostly-Greek, liberal-arts-educated circle seemed to be pursuing finance or law. It was too late for the finance recruiting cycle, so I applied to paralegal openings thinking I would go to law school in a year or two. I landed a job at the white-shoe law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher and moved to New York City.

New York was exciting and exhausting. My hours were unpredictable. A slow day was often upended by a close-of-business fire drill that required my presence at the office into the wee hours of the morning. It became clear that a career as a corporate lawyer wasn’t the ticket to success I had envisioned. I didn’t mind the intensity and hard work, but the reward (or lack thereof) wasn’t proportional. I knew I didn't want to be a wage worker forever, but in law, even the partners — the ones who have "made it" — bill hourly.

I had been at Willkie for about a year when a recruiter reached out with a role at the legendary private equity firm Apollo. I would be an Analyst (well, a “Legal Analyst”, meaning… still a paralegal) on the public funds team. Apollo’s public credit funds bear a greater regulatory burden than its private funds, and my job would be to assist with that extra work: preparing for and administering quarterly board meetings, getting ad-hoc approval for deals that required Board review, making legal filings, running compliance processes, etc. I didn't understand any of that at 22. I just saw a stepping stone into the glamor of high finance, and I took it.

It was a better fit than Willkie. The personalities were bigger. I liked the prestige, or at least the prestige I imagined. I liked going to work on the 37th floor of 9 West 57th Street, a storied office building on Central Park South with unobstructed views of the park. I liked living in the West Village, once the Bohemian heart of the city, being “neighbors” with celebrities and thinking that having the same zip code imbued me with the same social status (never mind that my apartment was one-tenth the size). Though I grumbled, I even liked the nights I stayed at the office until midnight or later, then cabbed home and took the elevator straight to the roof of my building to gaze out at Manhattan for a few minutes before returning below to get a few hours of sleep. I felt like my work was important, which made me feel important.

I grinded there for a few years, including the Covid years when New York was shut down. By the time Covid started to wind down, a lot had changed. I still had my ambition, but I was jaded about my role. I felt pigeon-holed in legal (can you believe they expected the paralegal to do legal work?) when all of the opportunity was in the front office. A reorganization and certain senior departures left me with little confidence that I’d be able to make the jump. With no lateral options, being a paralegal was a dead-end job — the senior people in legal are all lawyers, and you can’t be promoted to lawyer. You need a JD, and I didn’t want one.

Writing break. To be continued...