Why now?
After forty years of building, running, and selling companies, for myself and for others, that’s the question in front of me. I’m standing at an inflection point: do I finally become the mentor and consultant my younger self dismissed, or do I keep shaving years off my résumé and pretending my early experience doesn’t matter?
Here’s how I got here.
Forty years ago, I left UCLA with a degree in Mathematics and Computer Science. I imagined myself writing code, toward what end, I couldn’t have told you. Back then, everything “needed to be computerized,” computers were simpler, and no one quite knew what was coming. My first stop? A defense contractor. It wasn’t on any wish list: cubicles, bureaucracy, and a job taken out of necessity. I had student loans, a new marriage, and very little sense of what I actually wanted my work to mean.
Two years later, I broke free and started a business with two friends. I was under 25 and absolutely certain I knew it all. Why would I need a consultant, a mentor, or any kind of guide to entrepreneurship? We had energy, confidence, and not much else.
After a few early missteps, we found our footing. We built the company and sold it early a decade later. From there, my career followed a deliberate rhythm: corporate roles, new ventures, business plans drafted and refined, firms launched and exited. To the outside, it may have looked scattered. In reality, I was accumulating something far more valuable than titles: deep, hands-on experience across the full lifecycle of small and mid-sized companies.
The throughline was always Operations. I became the person who made things work – quietly, consistently, across functions and phases. It was a long way from writing code, but it taught me what execution really looks like.
A few years ago, a résumé writer told me to cut my earlier roles: “It’ll keep you from looking too old.” The implication was clear—hide the depth, package the surface.
Now, I’m choosing the opposite.
I’m not interested in minimizing four decades of building and selling companies just to fit into someone else’s idea of what a candidate “should” look like. The real value I bring is that history: the false starts and successful exits, the corporate stints and scrappy startups, the years in the operational trenches where theory either works in
practice or dies.
So, why now?
Because after forty years, it’s time to stop treating that experience as something to hide and start using it for what it’s worth: helping the next generation of business builders avoid the mistakes I made, shorten their learning curve, and build stronger companies.
I choose the former.
Today I launch Praxis LA!