It’s 2024; time for a revamp of my personal website. I’m grateful you’re interested in my life.
๐ผ What I’m Currently Doing
I’m a software engineer and small business owner.
Right now, I’m trying to solve what I think is an interesting problem. A survey of 8,000+ salespeople says that they spend less than 30% of their time actually selling. The average base salary for a salesperson in the US is $72,000 USD per year. If you take the humanity out of the equation, you have a $72k/yr asset achieving 28% utilization. There’s a way to get this number to 75-80% with global labor arbitrage. If you embed assistants in Latin America and the Philippines to groups of sales reps, you can delegate the administrative work burdening salespeople and increase their time spent selling significantly, by 2x-3x.
Theater is a big part of my life; I see 3-5 shows per week. I particularly love supporting understudies and swings; those are performers that fill in for contracted principal performers when they are unavailable. I’m building Understudies.org as a free resource to allow Broadway theatergoers to get notified when understudies go on.
I am heavily involved with, and the youngest board member at Hartford Stage, a Tony Awardยฎ-winning theater in Connecticut. I'm part of the Stage One group, which is the young professionals arm of the Board.
โ What I’ve Worked On In The Past
I ran one of the most selective student film festivals in the US, the Student Film Awards, with my co-director, Emmy Award winning editor John Musulin. We ran for 6 years, receiving 10,000+ submissions from 125+ countries. We wrapped up in September 2023 after failing to reach an agreement with our institutional partner.
When I was 16, I wrote a book on teen entrepreneurship and got invited to give a TEDx talk on the same topic. I’m proud of both of them, but the problem with writing a book when you’re 16 is that your thinking evolves very quickly. I still think both are good resources for young entrepreneurs, but my current viewpoints have changed significantly.
๐ Academic Affiliation
I’m a junior at Trinity College, where I was admitted as an 1823 Scholar. Apparently that designation means I have “strong academic vitality and personal character“. ๐คทโโ๏ธ
I dislike higher education, but am making the most of it. The benefit of attending a liberal arts school is I can shop around and take classes I'm interested in across many disciplines. I just wrapped up an independent study where I read, analyzed, and discussed 18 Arthur Miller plays. Earlier last year, I took a class about postcolonialism in the Philippines! There's a few gems like that among the muck.
My academic advisor is the extraordinary Katherine Lahti. Most of my active work on campus is with/in the Entrepreneurship Center, headed by Danny Briere.
While at Trinity, I had the opportunity to spend three semesters studying closely under Garry Apgar, hailed by Jerry Beck as “as one of the finer Disney historians writing today.” Apgar was an art historian for Diane Disney Miller, author of “Mickey Mouse: Emblem of the American Spirit“, and is current president of the Voltaire Society of America. My research under Apgar focused on the life, career, and family genealogy of James Baskett, who played Uncle Remus in ‘Song of the South’ and became the first Black actor to win an Academy Award for his performance.
๐๏ธ Fun Things I’ve Done/Am Doing
In January 2024, I took a cross-country Amtrak trip and visited 18 cities. I started in New York, went west through Chicago to Portland, down the California coast, back east through Texas and New Orleans, and then up through Atlanta to D.C. and back home.
In 2023, I saw 152 shows across Broadway, regional theater, the West End, and touring houses.
In March 2023, I spent two weeks in Morocco, marking my seventh continent visited (including Antarctica!) bringing me to 28 countries visited in total.
๐ Books I Love
Here are a handful of books I’ve read, reread, and recommended to people this year:
๐ง People I Admire
Here are some people I look up to and think are excellent at what they do.
Some I speak to daily, some I’ve never met in-person, and some are dead.