I grew up on a factory street in Buffalo, New York — a city that had once been among the most prosperous in America, and then wasn’t. I watched deindustrialization not as a policy abstraction but as a lived reality: shuttered plants, emptied storefronts, families losing everything they’d built. That shaped everything about how I think about institutional change. The cost of getting modernization wrong is measured in jobs and headlines, and you only learn that by standing inside it.

I became the first in my family to attend college. I earned two master’s degrees from Columbia University, then a JD and PhD from the University at Buffalo. As a graduate student I didn’t wait for someone else to act — I founded a chamber of commerce and a development policy think tank, convening businesses, government, and community to rebuild an economy from within. The Economist and Reuters covered what we built. More importantly: it worked.

That pattern has defined my career. I don’t advise from the outside looking in. I go inside and build. I have led $1B+ real estate initiatives, built legal operations functions from the ground up, and driven AI-enabled modernization across complex organizations. Through GeoPoliticus, I have advised executives, startups, and government entities on strategy, policy, and multi-stakeholder negotiation across energy, real estate, technology, and law.

My greatest strength is holding a large vision under pressure while bringing every stakeholder — skeptics included — forward together. That’s the work. It’s the only work I’ve ever done that actually changes anything.