How I got here.

I started buying and selling sneakers when I was fourteen. It reads like a hobby. The actual work was pricing, inventory, and working out which counterparty would actually pay, with my own money, before I could drive.

What I'd walked into was a market most people have never heard of: a few thousand serious participants worldwide, nearly all teenagers, building the infrastructure behind limited-release retail. Restock monitors, proxy networks, data services, paid information groups. All of it existed to save a customer a few hundred milliseconds at checkout, and customers paid a lot for that.

It had real price discovery. Software licenses traded on a secondary market at multiples of retail, and an exchange got built to clear those trades with escrow. Venture-backed founders and early employees at hypergrowth companies came out of the same Discords.

I ended up building inside it rather than buying from it: a subscription service I co-founded, and support and operations roles at three of the businesses other people ran.

That market repriced you in public every weekend. If your product underperformed on one release, members cancelled that night, not next quarter. I learned retention and incident response at an age when most of my friends had part-time jobs.

I also learned how to talk to people who outranked me. At fifteen I was working alongside adults who didn't care how old I was as long as I was useful. That's still the most valuable thing I took from it.

All of it ran alongside club and high school soccer: practice, a release at 10am on a Saturday, and a support queue that cared about neither.

Running services like those means eventually building them yourself. I taught myself HTML and CSS, then Python, Go, and Java, enough to ship and maintain the things subscribers were paying for. Some of my closest friendships came out of that stretch, with people I've still never met in person.

I went to the University of Kentucky in August 2023 for biomedical technology, aiming at medicine. It didn't last. What kept pulling at me was the market side. I was running an event-driven ticket book on the side, and it held my attention in a way the pre-med track never did.

So I switched to finance, and after three years at Kentucky I transferred to the University of Georgia in the fall of 2026, into the Terry College of Business, where I'm studying economics. FP&A in Singapore and equity research in Lexington while I was still at Kentucky, then private banking in Atlanta over the summer in between. The research side came naturally, because it used the same instinct as the sneaker work: understand what drives value, work out what other people are missing, and make a decision without complete information.

What I'm actually interested in is markets, geopolitics, and how capital moves around the world. You can't really follow one without ending up in the other two.

I'm comfortable on the technical side, and I'll build the model or write the measure or automate the report if that's what the job needs. I'm also comfortable with people, which comes from selling things and dealing with customers since I was fourteen rather than from anything I studied.

What I'd like is work where those two aren't separate jobs. Somewhere I can do the analysis and then be in the room when it gets discussed.