About Me
I’m an entrepreneur and investor doing everything I can to stay out of the cubicle. I love sports (especially soccer), food and traveling, or any way to combine the three.
I’m currently the managing partner of Magma Partners, a seed stage investment fund and accelerator based in Santiago, Chile that invests in startups that put technology into large businesses and companies that have their tech base in Latam and attack the US and European market.
In 2005, I bought ExchangeHut.com, after my freshman year at the University of Wisconsin, and transformed it from a local tickets and textbooks trading site with under 2,000 users to a profitable national business with over 125,000 users by the time I was a senior, leading to its acquisition by a publicly traded company in 2008.
A few months later, during my 2nd senior year, I teamed up with Jesse Davis to co-found Entrustet. Entrustet helps people access, transfer and delete online accounts after someone dies. We were featured in the NY Times, The Economist, TechCrunch, Mashable, Forbes, BBC and hundreds of others. In April 2012, Entrustet was acquired by SecureSafe, the market leader in digital estate planning and online data safes.
In November 2010, I moved to Santiago, Chile as the 7th team to participate in Startup Chile. It was an incredible experience and I wrote a ton of posts about my time in the program, including when I got give a speech in Spanish to Chile’s president. I also wrote a book called Startup Chile 101 about living, working and doing business in Chile.
I love speaking with entrepreneurs and showing people that entrepreneurship is a potential choice for young people and that college can be the best time to start a company. I enjoy talking with people to try to give them the entrepreneurial push toward either starting a company or working for a startup. In May 2009, I founded Capital Entrepreneurs to bring the burgeoning startup community in Madison closer together. I’m also the cofounder of Madison’s Forward Technology Conference and am a founding member of The Young Entrepreneur Council. To see what else I’ve been up to from 2000-2010, check out my decade in review.
In 2012 I came back to Chile to learn Spanish and look for business opportunities in Latin America and worked as head of marketing at Welcu, a Chilean startup. I also taught entrepreneurship at three chilean universities.
You can follow me on Twitter, find me on LinkedIn or send me a note through on my contact page.