My Story

I didn’t grow up in a startup incubator. I grew up in a restaurant kitchen and on a tree farm in a small town in South Jersey.

My mom came to the United States from Naples as a young teenager — no English, no playbook, no safety net. Her parents opened an Italian restaurant, and she went to work. She was learning a new language, figuring out a new country, and building a life from scratch, all at the same time. She didn’t just survive it. She built a family, and her and my dad went on to open their own restaurant — still running over 30 years later. Watching her move through life like that, with no excuses and no shortcuts, set the standard for everything I measure myself against.

My dad grew up the same way. Hands in the dirt, picking peaches on a farm as a kid, learning what work actually means and earning everything himself without anyone handing him anything. He was a college baseball player, so the discipline was already in his DNA. But what he really taught me went beyond work ethic. He taught me respect. Loyalty. How to treat people. How to communicate. How to carry yourself in a room full of strangers and make every one of them feel like they matter. He’s the reason I’m a relationships person — because he showed me that relationships are everything and the people you keep around you matter.

He had this motto he’d always say to me: “You never know who’s watching.” It didn’t matter if anyone was in the room. You move like it’s game time. You put in the reps when there’s no camera, no crowd, no audience — because a great mark of a person is what they do when nobody sees. That sticks with me in everything I do.

My dad’s twin brother, my Uncle Tom, was right there with him — same farm, same dirt, same work ethic. He went on to play basketball in college and professionally overseas, and he coached me growing up. Between my dad pushing me on the baseball field and my uncle coaching me on the basketball court, there was no version of my life where I didn’t learn how to compete, how to respect the game, and how to outwork everyone around me. My uncle was a huge part of the foundation that everything else was built on. Rest in peace, Uncle Tom. I love you and I miss you.

I grew up between that restaurant and a tree farm — driving tractors, mulching, mowing, cutting trees down. When I wasn’t doing that, I was on a baseball field or a basketball court. Every day was some combination of it all: farm, restaurant, field, court. I didn’t know it at the time, but those years built the operating system I still run on.

Baseball was supposed to be my path. My dad played in college, and I was chasing that dream from the time I could hold a bat.

In eighth grade, I had my first shoulder surgery. Then another. Then another. Three surgeries over two years. I missed my entire freshman year of high school baseball and came back halfway through sophomore year. Three surgeries before I ever played a high school game.

I was a pitcher my whole life, and after the surgeries I was told I’d never step on the mound again. At fifteen, I had a choice: walk away from the sport that defined me, or figure out how to become someone completely new.

I chose to rebuild.

I spent every hour I could at the training facilities. Reinventing myself into a hitter and position player — something that required learning the game from a completely different angle. I lived at those facilities. I worked until I couldn’t see straight, and then I worked some more.

By the time I was done, I was an all-state player with a Division I scholarship to Rider University. At Rider, I earned a starting spot as the only freshman in the lineup.

Then halfway through the season, I tore my labrum again.

I finished the year as a DH and when the season ended, I made the hardest decision of my life at the time. The success rate of another surgery wasn’t in my favor, and I hung up the cleats.

I was nineteen years old. The thing I’d built my entire identity around was gone.

Something breaks. I figure it out. I stand back up. I come back even stronger. I didn’t know it yet, but that pattern was just getting started.

After baseball, I didn’t know what I was anymore. I wasn’t an athlete. I didn’t have a direction. I just had time and a need to figure out what came next.

I had a pre-calc teacher in college who used to talk about the stars. Not the math, the actual stars. He’d tell us about driving to remote places just to see the sky without light pollution, about how different the universe looks when you get far enough away from everything else. I’d sit in class and think about it.

Then my boy Adam asked me to take a trip to Maine. A mountain, remote, nothing around. The electricity shut off at seven every night.

That first night, when the sun went down and the lights went out, the sky completely lit up. Every star, every constellation, the Milky Way stretched out above us like it was painted there. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

And I knew. Right there, on that mountain, I knew what I wanted to chase next.

I went back to school and declared a physics major with a concentration in astrophysics. I wanted to understand the mechanics of what I saw that night — the gravity, the light, the distances, the forces that hold everything together and pull everything apart.

That decision changed the trajectory of my entire life. Not because I became a physicist — but because physics taught me how to think. First principles. Break the problem down to its fundamental components and rebuild from there. Hypothesis, test, iterate. Don’t accept the conventional answer because it’s conventional. That framework runs everything I do now.

And it exposed me to technology — which is what eventually led me into startups.

I owe that shift to two people: the teacher who made me look up, and Adam, who pushed me to go.

Physics pulled me into a world I didn’t know existed. The deeper I went into my studies, the more I was surrounded by technology — programming, data, systems thinking, the tools that make modern science possible. I started to see how the same first-principles framework I was using to understand the universe could be applied to building things.

That’s when the switch flipped. I wasn’t just studying how things worked anymore. I wanted to build them. Startups became the place where everything I’d learned — the work ethic, the people skills, the resilience, the first-principles thinking — finally had a home.

My first venture was ZonedIn — a live streaming platform for sports recruiting. LinkedIn and Twitch were gaining serious traction, and my background gave me a lens most people didn’t have. Rider was a D1 school, but a smaller one with a smaller budget. I saw firsthand that coaches who couldn’t afford to fly across the country still needed to evaluate talent. ZonedIn was supposed to bridge that gap — give players exposure and give coaches access regardless of geography. I ran with it for about a year and a half, made real moves, but ultimately it failed. And that failure taught me more than any success could have. I learned what I didn’t know, where I cut corners, and what it actually takes to build something that lasts.

Instead of jumping straight back in, I made a smarter move. I took Head of BD roles at startups that were further along — companies that had raised millions and were operating at a level I hadn’t reached yet. I helped them grow, and in the process I got to see up close where I’d gone wrong before. I studied the mistakes from a different angle, learned from people who were a bit further ahead than where I got, and stored every lesson for when I was ready to build again.

Then I was ready. I built Smilesss, a Web3 brand that I scaled from nothing to millions in revenue. I closed partnerships with Warner Music Group, Under Armour, The Hundreds and more. I co-founded RELI3F, a charity project with over 50 artists that proved technology could drive real-world impact, and raised over $1.5M for charities worldwide. I was in rooms I had no business being in, figuring it out the same way I always had — by outworking everyone and refusing to pretend I knew something I didn’t until I actually did.

From there I co-founded Syntax Studios, a blockchain and AI development agency that’s scaled to millions in revenue, building for companies like Coinbase, 0x, and Story Protocol.

Every venture traces back to the same kid who rebuilt himself after three shoulder surgeries, chased the night sky into a physics degree, and never stopped asking: how hard can it be?

People try to put me in a box. I get it. It’s easier to label someone “the business guy” or “the startup guy” or “the sports guy” or something else, than it is to sit with the fact that someone might actually span all of those worlds.

I grew up in a restaurant, so I understand people. I grew up doing manual labor, so I understand work. I watched my mom build a life in a country where she didn’t speak the language, so I understand what real perseverance looks like. My dad taught me that relationships are everything, so I know how to walk into any room and make it work. I competed at the highest level in athletics, so I understand pressure. And I studied the universe, so I understand how to think.

When something catches my attention, I don’t skim the surface. I go all in. I read the research. I talk to the experts. I form my own opinions based on evidence, not consensus. I need to understand something deeply before I’ll claim to know it. That’s the science background — once you’ve been trained to think that way, you can’t turn it off.

You can throw me in a room with anyone, hand me any task, and I promise I’ll come out on top. Not because I already know the answer. Because I know how to find it.

None of it happened because I followed a playbook. It happened because the same pattern kept showing up: see something that interests me, go all in, figure it out.

I’m still figuring things out. I’m teaching myself guitar. I’m training. I’m deep in longevity science. I’m dialing in espresso on a manual machine. I’m exploring every city I visit through its restaurants and cafes. I’m studying designers and their histories. I’m using AI to build faster than I ever have.

I’m proud of what I’ve built, but I’m not confused about where I stand. There are people out there who’ve done ten times what I have, and I study them the same way I study everything else. I have a long way to go, a lot left to learn, and a lot left to prove. That’s the part that excites me the most.

The curiosity that started on a tree farm in South Jersey and caught fire on a mountain in Maine never went away. It just keeps expanding.

And that’s the theme. Not a title, not a company, not an exit.

A relentless, obsessive need to understand, to build, and to keep getting better.