Coaching
Before I turned twelve, I learned two things about money.
At ten, I learned compound interest. Around the same time I found out my parents owed $75,000 on credit cards at 20+%. My mom taught piano and earned maybe $40k in a good year. I decided that getting my family out of that hole fell to me.
At eleven, I learned what wealth can buy. A math scholarship sent me to a summer camp in Ireland. We couldn't afford the plane ticket, so my wealthy great-great-uncle, an Anglican priest, came along as my chaperone. On the layover home in Amsterdam he drugged and raped me. Afterward he held his money over my family to keep me quiet. My silence later paid for my siblings' college tuition.
I buried it so deeply that I didn't remember it for twenty years. What I had instead: depression, a dark streak nobody could explain, and a college life that swung between willful striving and self-destruction. Psychedelics cracked something open. They led me to Ram Dass and Robert Anton Wilson, then to meditation and martial arts. I dropped out, talked my way into a software career, and paid off my family's debts. From the outside it all worked. From the inside, something still felt wrong.
The memory came back through ayahuasca, many ceremonies in. I told my family, terrified they wouldn't believe me. They did, and they shared their own experiences with him. Then came years of therapy, anger work, grief, bodywork, and my martial arts practice, which rebuilt a physical sense of safety I'd lost. Once the anger came out, I realized how long I'd run my life on the geothermal energy of buried hatred, and that I would need new sources of energy.
I suspect many people run their careers on old fuel: fear, obligation, the need to prove something to a parent. It works, until it doesn't. Helping people find better fuel has become most of what I care about in coaching.
Meanwhile, I built a career at every layer of the stack and every stage of company: two people in an apartment, post-Series B hypergrowth, Google, two stints as a startup CTO, founding my own company and shipping three apps, cofounding UkraineDAO. Today I work on blockchain security at Coinbase.
Some things I learned the hard way:
- Your job serves as an instrument, not an identity. Once meaning no longer depends on your paycheck, the job gets lighter and life gets bigger.
- Practice, don't grind. If work feels like a grind, U've left your intelligence out of it.
- U hold more choice than U think, and less blame than U fear. "I have to go to this meeting" hides a decision U already made. But some difficulty simply happens to people, and nobody should have to earn their suffering to deserve compassion.
- Feeling trapped usually means the exit has a price, not that no exit exists. Name the price, and U can choose.
- Wealth means abundant time, resources, and health, all three together. I've seen money used as a leash. Having none doesn't make anyone virtuous; it just leaves them unable to help. I help people build wealth by expanding the commons, not by extracting from it.
- Play the infinite game. Finite games end with a winner. The game worth playing keeps the play going.
I started teaching as a homeschooled child, helping my three younger siblings. Later at Dev Bootcamp, I helped people change careers into software. Alongside Ruby and SQL I taught meditation, breathing, and emotional empathy, because those decided who thrived. I've trained in Bujinkan ninjutsu since 2013, and most work challenges feel simple next to the dojo. I've also journaled daily for 17 years.
My sessions draw on your head, your heart, and your gut. We find the question that feels most alive. Then U answer it the way U'd answer a dear friend, again with ease, and again with playfulness. Before we finish, we run a pre-mortem on how nothing might change.
I work with people who hate their jobs, and with people living on the margins whose relationship with money carries old debts, sometimes literal ones. I know both places.