I write Pulp Conversations from the perspective of someone who’s seen the machine from a few different angles: inside Fortune 100 boardrooms, inside tiny startups trying not to die, and inside design studios trying to make sense of all of it.
I started my career at AT&T in 1999, when it still felt like the center of the communications universe and the dot‑com era was in full swing. I joined a rotational program in the CFO’s office, bouncing through investor relations, supplier management, and other roles that plugged straight into the company’s biggest decisions. Our team worked on what was then the largest IPO in U.S. history, AT&T Wireless, a $10.6 billion spin‑off that was my crash course in capital markets, corporate storytelling, and the choreography between executives and Wall Street.
It was also the last pre‑Reg FD era, when information still moved through carefully managed back channels rather than neat, simultaneous disclosures. Around us, some of the telecom players that looked like stars on paper were later revealed to be built on fraud, while AT&T tried to compete the old‑fashioned way: by actually running the business. Watching that unfold from the inside gave me a healthy skepticism about incentives, earnings theater, and the kinds of stories numbers can be made to tell.
One of my roles at AT&T was managing the company’s global airline and hotel program; hundreds of millions of dollars a year in travel spend. That seat between a huge corporate budget and the world’s airlines and hotels is how American Express found me. They recruited me into a small global team that sat between big companies and the travel industry, helping align the needs of travelers, corporates, and suppliers. It also came with what may be the best corporate perk I’ll ever have: flying business class around the world (when I wasn’t on the clock) to experience the very products we were recommending.
At the same time, I was learning that classic corporate life and I were not a long‑term fit. The hierarchy, the slowness, the distance between a good idea and actually shipping something; it all started to feel like a ceiling. A parallel life around music and New York’s DJ culture, quietly nudged me toward entrepreneurship.
That impulse eventually took me to London for an MBA at London Business School and what became nearly fifteen years abroad. London in the mid‑2000s was buzzing: “new media” was still the buzzword, YouTube had just been acquired, the iPhone hadn’t yet rewritten everything. I worked on M&A in that shifting landscape, and later joined the Fleming family office; the same family behind James Bond. I like to joke that for a while I was doing investments for 007, especially since my desk sat next to the Ian Fleming Publications team.
In 2010, I co‑founded WhipCar, one of the world’s first peer‑to‑peer car rental marketplaces; basically Airbnb for cars before that phrase meant anything. We raised about a million dollars on a ten‑slide deck, launched in London, expanded across the UK, and ran for three years before winding the company down in a controlled way when we realized the market, infrastructure, and trust dynamics were still too early.
Sadly not a unicorn story but I learned a great deal about decisions vs. outcomes and hard work vs. luck. I witnessed how people actually behave and the requirement to meet them where they are, not necessarily where you want them to be.
I joined IDEO in London and led the business design discipline; essentially the “business guy” inside a world‑class design studio. My job was to help organizations make sense of messy problems at the intersection of behavior, markets, and design, and to turn human‑centered insight into strategies, experiments, and business models that could actually live in the real world.
Today, I manage my own capital through a private long–short equity portfolio, make selective private investments, and work with a small number of founders and executives each year as a thinking partner on their hardest problems.
Pulp Conversations is where I connect the dots in public: money and psychology, big companies and small ones, design and incentives, and the very human ways ideas slowly become reality.
If this resonates with you, it’s also a pretty good preview of what it’s like to have me in the room with you.
P.S. - If you don’t already know, I am a coffee nerd. Via actual human interaction that involves me going to the volcanic highlands of Panama, I source some of the tastiest (and most expensive) coffee in the world.
