01 The origin
I caught the bug before I knew the words for it.
I grew up watching my dad build a business from nothing. He started his own company, and I spent summers in his office — working on his website, learning what it actually takes to get a business off the ground. Nobody hands you customers. You earn them. That stuck with me.
In college I found poker. What started as micro-stakes games online turned into the next six years of my life — and everything changed.
02 The real education
Poker taught me everything a classroom couldn't.
I grinded my way up to high stakes, online and across the felt in casinos. Done for a living, poker isn't gambling — it's applied probability, pattern recognition, bankroll discipline, and the patience to wait for the right spot paired with the nerve to bet big when you find it. I still play, including the WSOP in Vegas most summers.
More than anything, poker taught me to think like an entrepreneur and to make decisions with real money on the line and incomplete information — and to know the difference between a good decision and a good outcome.
Find your edge, protect it, and press it when the odds are in your favor. That's the whole game.
03 The pivot
Black Friday handed me a forcing function.
April 15, 2011 — Black Friday. The government shut down online poker in the U.S. and forced a decision I'd been avoiding. I started by selling billboard advertising to local businesses. It wasn't glamorous, but sitting across from owner after owner — learning how they thought about their customers and their growth — something clicked. I could combine the thing I loved about helping my dad with the quantitative, strategic thinking poker had drilled into me.
So I studied marketing at night until I broke in — first at TechTarget, then up through the HubSpot ecosystem, demand generation at AvidXchange, acquisition marketing at Drift, and Head of Marketing at Frase. Different companies, different stages, IPOs and acquisitions along the way — same job every time: find the system, find the leverage, build the engine that compounds.
04 Today
Building at the intersection of organic growth and AI.
Today I'm Director of Growth at Kraken, one of the most recognized crypto exchanges in the world — and I'm part of the internal AI team rebuilding how we operate, turning Kraken into an agentic-led business. So I'm not theorizing about where growth is headed. I'm building it, in production, in one of the most competitive and regulated industries there is.
Here's what I believe: growth has never been more competitive, and most companies respond by burning capital on paid acquisition that stops working the moment they stop paying. I help them find a better edge — durable organic growth, amplified by AI and agents, built as a system instead of a series of campaigns.
I think and operate like a product leader. I happen to sit on the marketing team.
The levers I work across
05 The through-line
One story about finding edges in complex systems.
The through-line from poker player to organic growth advisor isn't a winding road. It's one story about someone who learned to read patterns in complex systems, bet on asymmetric opportunities, and build compounding advantages where the stakes are high.
That's what I bring to every engagement — and it's something no agency or generalist consultant can replicate.
Based in Boston. Working globally. Always playing the long game.