Startups are here to save the world.
I genuinely believe that.
Progress drives human wellbeing. Innovation drives progress. Startups increase the rate of innovation.
A startup is a small group of ambitious people who can pursue weird ideas without asking permission.
That’s the whole trick.
Startups don't need to balance protecting existing revenue, power structures, and beliefs. Startups can bet everything on heretical ideas that might be wrong.
- They live on the edge of failure. Startups don’t get to be conservative. They live on the frontier. If they don’t find something that works, they die. That pressure forces them into unexplored territory.
- They can follow the truth instead of consensus. In a large organization, decisions are social. Memetic. If a founder holds a belief, they go build it. Reality settles the score, not internal politics.
- They’re run by builders. Startups are led by people who make things. They run into the fire, feel the pain firsthand... and fix it. If they can't they pivot. Big company managers can't do that.
- They’re allowed to be weird. Someone will pay to sleep on your couch, sell books on the Internet, just throw some compute at a neural network. Yeah, that might work... Startups can pursue outlier ideas.
- They place asymmetric bets. A startup can only go to zero(ish). A world changing idea well executed has uncapped upside.
This all looks inefficient, and it is. Life on the frontier is messy but it moves the world forward.
But...we have an access problem.
Outdated regulations, market structures, and conventions have left most people on the sidelines while tech startups generate generational wealth for private market investors. I believe it's critical for a healthy society to allow everyone to become a stakeholder in a future defined by technological innovation.
This is where I have focused my life's work. I have served as Chief Legal Officer at AngelList for over 9 years. I helped build the legal and compliance frameworks that scaled to support over 6,000 GPs backing 29,000 startups with more than $170B. Along the way, I have helped lead cross-functional teams from operations to customer relations. Today, I am focused on building new products that expand access to private technology companies at AngelList Asset Management.
My work sits at the intersection of law, finance, and technology: designing scalable legal frameworks, launching new capital products, and rethinking how private markets function.
Background
Before AngelList, I was a partner at Olshan where I was building a Venture Capital and Emerging Company Practice and learning from some inspiring lawyers and clients.
Before law, I worked as a high school teacher in the South Bronx.
More: LinkedIn
Family
I love my wife and our two children ... and our two dogs. I do not do performative things, so you will not hear about them here.
Mountains
I ski mountaineer. It's the most intense way I know to pursue my lifelong love of the mountains. Type II+ fun is my bag, and I share a few things here if ski partners want to see what I've been up to.
This Site
A place to collect writing on policy, legal engineering, apps I vibe code, foundational ideas I return to, and trip reports from the mountains. The Librarian is an interface to my knowledge graph, a Roam Research database spanning venture capital, regulation, psychology, philosophy, SciFi, and organizational behavior.