Pioneer Square Labs · Tribe Ventures
Lack of momentum kills more
new ventures than bad ideas do.
I work with the teams building them, inside big companies and in startups, on problems worth solving, so the wins start showing up on the board. Trusted in the boardroom, in it with the team.
Ex-Flashfood CRO, 4 → 2,000+ stores and 145M lbs of food kept out of landfill · McKinsey Leap & BCG · Pioneer Square Labs
Professional Background
Recent work
Honda · A Fortune 15 telecom
What I do
Build it, partner it, scale it, or turn it around. Different rooms, same job: get the team moving and the wins on the board. None of this is hypothetical.
New ventures inside and alongside large companies.
Designed Honda's venture-building engine and the team that now runs it. Global Lead for McKinsey Leap. Venture builder at BCG. Head of the innovation studio at Pioneer Square Labs.
Corporate partnerships, business development, corporate development.
Corporate partnerships lead at Pioneer Square Labs. Venture programs with Fortune 150 partners. VP Partnerships, then CRO, at Flashfood, where the enterprise grocery deals took the footprint from 4 stores to 2,000+.
From early traction to a national footprint.
Built and led the Flashfood marketplace as CRO and Chief Marketplace Officer. 50M pounds of food diverted and $120M saved by shoppers by 2022; 145M+ pounds and $370M+ today, anchored by Meijer, Giant Eagle and Stop & Shop.
Large operating and profit improvements.
Principal at BCG and Global Topic Lead for AI/ML personalization. Led major transformations for global enterprises across retail and airlines, with AI-enabled work well before AI was the headline.
The same record, dated and on one page: résumé
For the ones carrying the weight
Building something real is a lonely, hard thing. Your investors judge from the outside. Your team is often doing this for the first time. The weight of getting it right sits on you, and mostly you carry it alone. You shouldn't have to.
I've sat in that seat, and I've done the work of taking something to real scale. When I'm in, I'm all the way in.
Why it matters now
If it stays stuck
The window closes. The budget gets written off. A competitor scales the thing you saw first. The team that believed in it burns out and drifts. Potential does not wait.
If it breaks through
The product finds its market and starts to compound. The AI changes how the work actually gets done. The bet you fought for becomes a real business, and you are the one who got it there. Not alone.
Questions I get asked
Each one began as a real question from a leader I work with. The answer became the work.
“My meetings go well. So why isn't the deal moving?”
A read on buyer readiness: the scorecard the buyer runs on you, in six gates. Built to be run, not just read.
“I never trained at a place like McKinsey. How do you operate at that level?”
An ex-consultant's daily, weekly, and monthly operating system, adapted from the McKinsey playbook.
“Half our strategic bets are underperforming. Which do we cut, fund, or double down on?”
Underperformance can't tell you whether to cut, fund, or double down. Only a pre-committed gate can.
“AI writes half our code now. Do we still need the senior people?”
As AI eats execution, the scarce thing isn't producing the work. It's owning the call, and being the name on the result.
Working through a version of your own?
What's on your mind?Recent engagements
The operator record · Flashfood, 2019–2022 and since
How we work together
Whether you arrive with a sharp question or a mandate bigger than any one project, the work runs on the same discipline. Where you start depends on where you are.
Where to start
Not sure which fits? Tell me what's on your mind, and if I'm not the right fit, I'll point you to who is.
The discipline behind every engagement
Get to the real question, pressure-test the path, make it real, build or buy, and drive it through to results.
Start the conversation
The hardest part of most big moves is naming the real question. Send me a question, a decision, or a challenge you're working through. Some become a conversation, some the next brief, and I read and reply to every one. A lower-stakes first step than booking a call.
A note on calls: I sometimes use an AI notetaker to capture action items. I always ask first, and you can opt out anytime, before or during the call. See the Privacy Policy.