I grew up in Florence, Montana, a small town in the Bitterroot Valley where the mountains rise like a wall between the vast prairies of the East and the final frontier of the Pacific Coast. Lewis and Clark passed through the same valley on their way west, pushing through a gauntlet of challenges against nature before eventually reaching what is now the Pacific coastline of the United States. Growing up in a place that sometimes felt tucked away from the rest of the world had its advantages and disadvantages. Mostly advantages, as the type of people who find their way West tend to be full of adventure, grit, and a desire to get the most out of life and the outdoors.
Only later did I realize how much I benefited from teachers who could have made more money elsewhere but chose Montana for the skiing, the fly fishing, or simply the solitude of the mountains. Those early years taught me to pay attention to the spaces between things — the quiet moments, the long drives, the people you meet in places that don’t rush you. While it seems obvious now, I grew up a Grizzly and later moved to Missoula to attend the University of Montana. I considered schools all over the country and even the ROTC program, but financially it made sense to stay local. I wondered how my education would compare to some of the big-name universities I’d read about, but I was persistently surprised by the talent that finds its way under the Big Sky.
My college years were a time of exploration, stretching from the sciences to media and entertainment. I was one of the first volunteers at the student-run radio station KBGA 89.9 FM, co-hosted the morning show (earning the number-one rating in Missoula, at least in my memory), and later took on roles in sales and promotions. There I learned what it meant to build a community with nothing more than a microphone and a few watts of power. I also worked as a sports announcer for Grizzly track and field, volleyball, and basketball. Those were small roles, but they shaped me. They taught me the art of public speaking, how to improvise, and how to notice stories hiding inside the routine.
I quickly gravitated toward a business degree with an emphasis on computer science, pulled in by the growing potential of the World Wide Web. Thanks to my parents — both teachers — I’d had access to computers and, eventually, the Internet since public school. I built websites for my father’s side businesses, for the station, and for friends and local organizations. But what fascinated me most was how the Internet collapsed distance and culture. We used to joke that whatever was “hot” in big cities hit Montana a couple of years later. Suddenly, kids like me in small towns could see the same trends, music, and style at the same time as everyone else.
Looking back, the themes were already forming. I wasn’t just interested in how technology worked — I wanted to understand people, motivations, and context. I was drawn to early signals, long before I had the language to describe them. While we’d just launched a traditional FM broadcast, I could see that the Internet would let us reach listeners far beyond Missoula and the Bitterroot Valley. That led me to set up one of the first stereo live streams of a college radio station online.
As analog cell phones gave way to digital networks, the convergence felt obvious. I was imagining a life lived inside a mobile, interconnected fabric. That vision pushed me toward telecommunications and high-tech companies, and I knew I wanted to see as much as possible as quickly as possible. Consulting was the clearest path. I practiced mock interviews with Andersen Consulting — now Accenture — every year of college.
My early career took me far from Montana, through those same Bitterroot Mountains, and down to San Francisco. At Accenture, I learned how to build large-scale enterprise systems and worked on a range of projects focused on digitizing businesses and enabling early forms of electronic commerce. Consulting gave me the breadth I wanted — a vantage point like the peak of a mountain. I saw the inner workings of more than a dozen Fortune 500 companies and several startups. Alongside the typical travel routine, I also had an extraordinary expat experience living and working in India, where I learned how global teams collaborate across cultures, priorities, and time zones. It taught me discipline, adaptability, and how to deliver real work under imperfect conditions.
Eventually I moved deeper into e-commerce and digital experience. At Adobe, I helped define what became known as “experience-driven commerce.” At Intel, I worked on how physical and digital environments would merge for retailers and CPG brands, bringing to life the earliest ideas I’d had about the Internet of Things. At IBM, I tried to pull WebSphere Commerce into the SaaS era while also shaping merchandising and analytics products used by many major retailers and global brands. Later, at Elastic Path, I helped shepherd the company through a critical growth phase and a Series B funding round. After multiple stints at software companies building tools for brands and retailers, I joined a traditional retailer, Gap Inc, to explore the elusive goal of personalized marketing at scale — and to understand what was missing between the promise of technology and its real-world adoption. Today, I’m at Yottaa, working on the future of e-commerce performance, AI-assisted insight, and how real user data can make digital experiences faster, more intuitive, and more meaningful.
But none of these roles define me on their own. They’re chapters, not identity. The real story is a blend of Montana pragmatism, curiosity about how things work, and a lifelong habit of noticing small signals before they converge into something bigger. I’ve always been fascinated by the intersection of technology and human behavior — why people choose what they choose, why certain products resonate, why experience matters even when we can’t articulate why. I don’t think of myself as a futurist, but I do pay close attention to patterns, contradictions, and opportunities hiding in plain sight. Most of my best work has come from following those threads.
These days I’m trying to write more about what I’ve learned — partly so I don’t forget and partly because someone else might find it useful. I’m raising two remarkable kids who constantly remind me how quickly the world is changing. I’m trying to build products that help more than they complicate. And I’m still anchored by the same values that shaped me in Montana: be curious, be decent, work hard, keep improving, and stay humble no matter where the road leads.
If you’re here for the short, professional version of my story, you’ll find that on the bio page. This one is for the long-form readers — the people who like to know where someone really came from and what they’ve learned to notice along the way.
