MY CONTRARIAN, SELF-LED, ENTREPRENEURIAL PATH BEGAN AT 13... 

when I left school and self taught to earn my diploma by 16, turned a construction job into a NYC banking internship at 17, used my non traditional experience to get into the Ivy League, arbitrated a labor case and negotiated collective bargaining agreements against lawyers when I was just out of undergrad, earned my MBA, and joined the X PRIZE Foundation to incent innovators to solve the world’s biggest problems, regardless of their resume qualifications.

While there, I led a prize development team (in spite of not having the usual Ph.D. in the field) in the Ideation phase of design of a $15M Global Learning X PRIZE, aimed at driving radical breakthroughs in the way people learn, with guidance from visionaries like Sir Ken Robinson, Sugata Mitra, Nicholas Negroponte, and the MacArthur Foundation. The commonality I found along the way was that these big thinkers approached the world with a different mindset - one in which nothing was impossible.

And so I left X PRIZE to tackle one of the most “impossible” problems I learned about during prize design: youth unemployment. After raising over $500k to start Qualifyor, a youth work skills program, we developed everything in house. We created applications, performed interviews, built curricula, matched employers and mentors with the youth, and designed and ran skills competitions for two annual cohorts of high school students, in service of a question, “What should people learn about life (and work) that isn’t taught in school?”

Although that mission remains one I am incredibly passionate about, it occurred to me that someone who had left school to self teach was probably not the best suited to be running a formal education program. So we closed down Qualifyor and I did some soul searching in the form of Ikigai exploration (a.k.a. reason for being, based on what you are good at, love, can be paid for, that the world needs). I realized that given my experience, education, skills, and passion, I could best serve the world by using first principles reasoning to challenge the antiquated mindsets that shape our organizations and institutions. With that realization, I went rogue. Consulting, advising, facilitating, speaking, writing, coaching, trustee-ing (yes, I made that word up) - the role doesn’t matter as much as the mission.

I’m here to change your mind.