About

I got my first F studying engineering at Harvey Mudd.

Now, I’m featured as an alumnus entrepreneur.

I was a straight-A student all my life. I was in the International Baccalaureate program, and I never once questioned whether I belonged in a classroom.

Then I got to Mudd.

The people around me were brilliant in a way I had never encountered. At just 19 years old, many of my peers were already building things like Dreamhost and Gravatar. I would spend hours studying for finals and still land around 50%, while some of my peers could party all weekend, walk into the room hungover, and score an A.

I had stomach aches just about every day for two years from the pressure to keep up.

I managed to graduate, then became an aerospace engineer: an internship at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, then five years on satellites and defense systems at Northrop Grumman and DRS, earning an M.S. in computer engineering from USC along the way. I had seemingly accomplished my goal.

Then I started dabbling in internet marketing for fun, and something caught my attention.

Technically superior products were losing to inferior products. Constantly. And it all came down to their marketing.

That bothered me. In 2008 I left aerospace to teach business owners how to market online, and at its peak I put together a live event in Las Vegas that drew 1,000 attendees. In 2014 I co-founded Deviate Labs to apply the same systematic thinking I used as an engineer to the question of growth. Three years later my co-founder Chad Riddersen and I wrote it down in Growth Hacking: Silicon Valley’s Best Kept Secret.

Since then I’ve co-founded two more companies in categories that have nothing in common: Up Paint, which turns waste paint into premium interior paint, and Immersive Audio Album, built for the audiophile community. Different industries, same playbook.

Honestly, I still have imposter syndrome. The kid with the stomach aches ended up on the cover of the alumni magazine.

Here’s what I’d tell any early-stage entrepreneur reading this: your success will probably look nothing like what you pictured. I used my degree, but not in the way I predicted at 18.

So stay open to the success you didn’t plan for.