I grew up watching my dad build a company from nothing — an engineer who solved problems with his hands and his mind. I caught the bug early: the right message, in the right place, at the right time, can change a business.
In college I discovered online poker, and it became my real education — probability, pattern recognition, discipline, knowing when to be patient and when to pull the trigger. Around the same time I started a baseball stats blog with solid analysis and almost no readers. That taught me the lesson that's shaped everything since: distribution matters as much as the idea.
When the game changed overnight, I took those instincts into business. The pattern's been the same ever since — walk into a system, find the leverage points, and build the engine that compounds.