About

My father’s good friend Don, a postal worker, was often around little league baseball games and barbeques when I was growing up. He became known for surveying a situation and then offering wise observations that had a habit of being useful, insightful, and a little bit funny. He’d often follow these nuggets of wisdom with a trademark line of “But what do I know? I’m just a sweaty-ass mailman.”

Ray Dalio, billionaire, echoes this pre-emptive, reverse, ad-hominem move by laying out the following in his book Principles: “Before I begin telling you what I think, I want to establish that I’m a dumb shit who doesn’t know much relative to what I need to know”

I agree with Don and Ray. What I mean to say is that the content I create for The Generalist should stand on its own merit, and that my background shouldn’t be a determining factor in the value you do or do not find in the words I write.

To the extent that you still care who I am, here’s a quick bio: I was born and raised on Long Island in New York, the fourth and least athletic of five children. I have a degree in engineering from Columbia that I basically never used and half an MBA from Stanford. I’ve started my own company, and worked in management consulting as well as a range of venture-backed tech startups. In my travels I’ve worked in ops, sales, business development, product, customer support, and community.

There are a lot of things I don’t know.