Personal — No. 04
The other resume
The outdoors taught me one repeatable skill: take a calculated risk, read the result honestly, and take a slightly bigger one next time. I ran that loop on rivers, towers, and couloirs for twenty years. It's also how I run businesses.
Before any of it, I was a river guide.
High school summers guiding whitewater across the Southeast: the Chattooga, the Ocoee, the Nantahala, the Upper Green, the Nolichucky, the French Broad. Guiding is the simplest form of the skill. Read the rapid, pick a line, run it, and let what happens decide what you try next. Good reads earn you harder water. Bad reads get corrected on the spot.
I didn't have language for any of that then. It was just the job: judge the water honestly, decide deliberately, and get people down rapids that punish a careless read.
Graduated in 2016. Moved to the base of Mount Sopris. Took the same skill to bigger terrain.
The next decade ran on two tracks: the career you can read about everywhere else on this site, and the same approach outside. Backcountry skiing and rock climbing, carried over from Colorado College and taken seriously. Desert towers in southeast Utah. The Diamond on Longs Peak. Ski descents of Castle Peak and Sopris itself. Every objective was earned by the one before it: the test piece before the tower, the resort day before the couloir.
Mostly, an enormous amount of fun hogging around Carbondale and the desert with people I trusted on the other end of the rope. It never felt like discipline. It felt like fun. The discipline was why the fun kept working.
In 2021 I built out a van, and the map got bigger.
Single-day ski ascents and descents of Mount Baker and Mount Shuksan that June. The Tetons in 2022: a descent of Apocalypse Couloir and a sub-7-hour summer speed ascent of the Grand. Two weeks of sport climbing in Chulilla, Spain.
Then a July in Chamonix: the Voie Contamine, the Dent du Géant, and the Cosmiques Arête solo in under an hour. The objectives kept getting bigger for one reason: the process kept earning it.
Business is the same practice. The feedback is a P&L.
The skill moved over without changing shape. Pick the goal. Size the risk you can afford. Run the experiment. Read the data honestly. Take the next, slightly bigger step. New channels, new hires, new technology: I treat each one like an objective, and I work them the same way I worked the list above.
the field
Scope the line from the valley before you rope up.
the p&l
Build the annual growth model before you spend a dollar.
the field
Run the test piece before the objective.
the p&l
Open the new channel small: an affiliate program at 2% of revenue, iterated to 8%.
the field
Turn around when the mountain says no.
the p&l
Pull spend back at the CAC ceiling.
the field
Check conditions every morning, no exceptions.
the p&l
The daily revenue read, every morning, for years.
The part that transfers best is knowing when to turn around. In the mountains, the summit is optional and getting down isn't. In business, the target is optional and the P&L isn't. That judgment is worth more than any single send.
Home to Greensboro. The practice redeploys.
Moving home to Greensboro, where I grew up. Getting married in September 2025. Living near family again. For the first time in twenty years, I'm deliberately taking less personal risk.
The appetite didn't shrink. It moved to work. I want the bigger swings to be professional now: more capital at stake, new technology inside growing companies, and the responsibility that comes with both. The right team gets someone who knows how to size a risk, read the feedback, and go again. That's what ready to build means.
