I've never taken
the expected path.

Before I raised venture capital, I worked in the White House. Before I sold my first startup to Mattel, I was told the odds were against me. I did it anyway. And before all of it, I was a high school teacher.

I co-founded Caribu, an interactive video-calling platform for families, scaled it to international recognition, and sold it to Mattel in 2022. Before that, I served as a White House Fellow and senior policy advisor at the U.S. Treasury Department under President Obama. I ran Teach For America as Executive Director in Miami-Dade. I consulted for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I started my career in management consulting at Booz & Co.

Through all of it, the thread has been the same. I was not advising from the outside. I was the one making the call, with my own board, my own budget, and my own payroll to make. I've done it across government, media, technology, education, nonprofits, and startups. Across countries. Across industries no one expected me to be in.

And the teacher never left. I was trained to take something genuinely hard and make it land for the person in front of me. That turned out to matter more than I expected, because of what happened next.

Here is the part people do not expect. I am not natively technical. I have never written production code. A couple of years ago I started using AI the way a curious operator does, to get real work done, and I went all the way in. I built Dark Horse Ops on it. I do not run this company with a human team. I run it with a small cabinet of AI agents I built myself, and they handle a startling amount of the actual work. I learned agentic AI the only way that sticks, by building things and breaking them until I understood why the fix worked. I write about it every week. Somewhere in there the work changed, and the thing I had taught myself out of necessity turned out to be the thing executives most needed someone to teach them.

"Most advisors give you frameworks. I give you what actually happened in the room, because I was in the room."

I named this company Dark Horse because that's the story of my life. The underestimated one. The one nobody saw coming. A dark horse is the person in the room who wasn't supposed to win but did, because they outworked, out-prepared, and out-operated everyone else. That's who I work with, and that's how I work.

So now most of my time goes to one thing. I sit with executives, privately, and get them genuinely fluent in AI. Not the version where you can prompt a chatbot. The version where you understand what your team is actually building and can tell which vendors are real. Most of the leaders I work with are quietly behind and have nowhere safe to admit it. I am the person they can ask the basic question without it getting back to their team. I still work with founders, and that lives on the Founders page. But the executive who has to lead in AI with no cover to learn it is the work I care most about right now.