Brown University

Brown was an obvious choice. I'd considered film school, but decided I wanted a broader education — I figured I could always learn the technical side of filmmaking on my own. What I couldn't teach myself was how to think across disciplines, and Brown's open curriculum gave me room to do that. I started as a Modern Culture & Media major but found I cared less about the theory of media and more about its actual impact on the world. So I landed in History, where I could pursue the questions that genuinely fascinated me.

I had two threads within my concentration. The first explored how the emergence of new media — photography, film, radio — fundamentally changed the way history was recorded, edited, and understood. When you read something, you maintain a distance from it; you can interrogate the text, form your own images. But when you see a video or a photograph, it lands differently. It's more immediate, more visceral, harder to question. I'd argue this is one of the reasons the world has become more polarized — people don't always recognize the level of editing and framing that goes into visual media, and it shapes how they understand reality. That challenge has only intensified with the rise of AI-generated content, where what's "real" is increasingly difficult to agree on.

The second thread traced how energy regime transformations — from fire to farming, steam engines to fossil fuels, and now solar and nuclear — have driven step-function increases in humanity's ability to do work. If you plot the arc of civilization and quality of life, it tracks remarkably well against how societies capture, store, and use energy. That lens became even more relevant as I started thinking about AI: the bottleneck for these systems is ultimately energy production and efficiency, and an energy transition could unlock the next exponential leap in what technology can do for us.

After my first year at Brown, I spent 40 days in the Brooks Range — the Noatak Wilderness and Gates of the Arctic National Park, in the northern reaches of Alaska. I went out there with seven other students and two instructors. No cell phone, no hot water, no wallet, no amenities. A thousand miles from the nearest road. I'd never camped before. I'd barely spent a single night in a tent.

The first ten days are about learning to survive: pitching shelter, handling injuries, cooking in the backcountry, foraging. You're backpacking through terrain with no trails — you have a destination you need to reach, and you plot your own route using topographical maps with no real sense of what the ground looks like until you're standing on it. You make your best-guess plan, pick a line, and start moving. Sometimes you have to adjust because a river is impassable or a slope turns out to be a scree field you can't safely navigate with a crew. And it's not just about whether you can make it — it's about how you work as a team. These environments create real pressure. You're not sleeping well, you're not eating much, you're tired and wet and not happy. But you're stuck there together, and your literal survival depends on having the emotional stability to work through it. You get to know people at a fundamental level in those conditions. There's no better place to learn real leadership than navigating primal challenges in the wilderness with a group of people who are counting on each other.

But the deeper shift happened when I moved past surviving into thriving. Being completely disconnected from technology for that long changed how I thought about it. We spend so much of our lives organizing our days around our devices, but at the end of the day, technology is supposed to be a tool — something that helps us go achieve things, not something we serve. In the backcountry, what you need is clear: shelter, food, water, safety. Everything else is a want. And I realized that in modern life, we constantly confuse the two. We fill our time with things we think we need to do without ever asking the more important question: what do I actually want? Once you decide what you want, what you need to do reveals itself. That reframing — want first, then need — is something I've tried to carry with me ever since.

Those two intellectual threads converged into a question I couldn't let go of: if better energy systems produce better hardware, and better hardware produces better software, and that cycle keeps accelerating — what happens to work? Technology creates enormous value, but that value doesn't distribute itself equally. There would likely be significant displacement in the types of jobs people do, and that gap would need something to bridge it.

I started exploring the role marketplaces could play — future-forward platforms that don't just match people to today's jobs but help set up the kinds of roles we'll see more of tomorrow. That line of thinking is what led me to build the earliest version of Pangea: a fractional hiring platform designed to connect people with flexible, high-quality work. Alongside that, I was also looking at models like Alaska's Permanent Fund and Scandinavian sovereign wealth funds — places where revenues from natural resource extraction are redistributed in ways that genuinely improve quality of life. The idea that entrepreneurship-driven capitalism and stronger social safety nets aren't opposites but complements stuck with me. Pangea was my way of working on one side of that equation.

Brown gave me three things I didn't know I needed. An intellectual framework for thinking about how technology, media, and energy shape society. A wilderness experience that rewired how I think about leadership, survival, and what actually matters. And the earliest version of an idea — Pangea — that I'd spend the next decade building. I arrived as a kid who liked making videos. I left as someone with a point of view about where the world was heading and a conviction that I could build something to meet it.