Venture Building
.svg)
.svg)
I made key exec hires for this venture.
.svg)
This work had industry-leading outcomes.
.svg)
This venture had an exit.
.svg)
This work supported resilience or climate-mitigation.
.svg)
This work was in the spirit of public service.
I made key exec hires for this venture.
This work had industry-leading outcomes.
This venture had an exit.
This work supported resilience or climate-mitigation.
This work was in the spirit of public service.
I established the Pardon family office with Nicholas Pardon in 2021, and served as Managing Director for its first season of operation. I architected our strategy to parlay our strengths in inbox publishing into building formidable ventures across multiple industries, recruited our executive team, and led the choreography of our first phase of venture development.
Now that the family office has become established via success in our digital media portfolio, I've taken the Head of Ventures role, overseeing our brand building & venture growth, executive search, and major transactions work (acquisitions and partnerships) as we scale our operation.
Pardon's campus is in Orange County, with team presence in Denver and New York City.
I am the executive sponsor for our work supporting Palladium Magazine, a publication dedicated to imaging new futures, with a focus on governance futurism.
Upon establishing the Pardon family office, we reconfigured the owned-and-operated inbox-first media companies of the portfolio into a single global media brand: Optimism. We changed and added leadership in multiple executive roles, re-ignited the brand launching capability, modernized the revenue strategy, raised the bar for brand quality and data infrastructure, and launched three of the most successful brands in the company’s history, including Nice News. Those turnaround efforts led to Optimism becoming an iconic American media company, reaching millions ofAmericans in their inbox each morning.
In its second phase, Optimism is now a growing venture platform focused on health & wellness: a portfolio of premium newsletters, high-trust brands, and diversified offerings with a world-class audience insights platform at the core.
Super Age is a lifestyle brand focused on vital longevity, a delivering actionable insights based on rigorous research. Super Age’s flagship publication, The Mindset newsletter, reached 1M subscribers in just over 6 months.
Formidable was my boutique talent consultancy and executive search firm. I used a network of org design consultants, recruiters, and other specialists to help companies navigate challenges and opportunities related to talent, recruiting, and organizational performance. Formidable used a mix of retainer and project/search-based models to serve a wide range of companies. In addition to HR&A and BerlinRosen, Formidable's clients included other organizations leading sustainable development in New York City, including The High Line and the Waterfront Alliance.
HR&A Advisors is an industry-leading firm in urban and economic development, advising private, public, and philanthropic clients on how to improve quality of life in cities. When I met them, they had a talent function that was sorely in need of upgrades and the development of a strategic roadmap. I built them a roadmap, recruited multiple Directors and dozens of Analysts while diversifying their team, recruited their first Head of People, and designed a fundamentally new organizational model that would allow them to effectively scale their high-performing, cohesive culture. All of this took place over several years, enabling them to grow from $AAM/year to $BBM/year.
BerlinRosen is an industry-leading communications & public affairs firm. When I met them their business growth was being held back by an outdated and underperforming people department. I re-architected their people department, overhauled their processes and approach to searches, and recruited several team leads across the company. As their growth compounded from $XXM/year to $YYM/year, they eventually raised private equity funding, created a parental company called Orchestra, and began acquiring other communications firms. I advise Brightmode Talent, their spin-out communications search firm.
I advised a Greenwich CT based single family office in their talent strategy as they adapted a longstanding capability in mature company turnarounds into an early-stage venture studio model of acquiring stuck companies and pivoting them into success. I advised on hiring multiple Partners and the firm’s first Chief of Staff, strategizing on several portfolio CEO and CXO hires, and setting up a talent infrastructure for building pipelines at a fraction of the cost of recruiting firms.
My first career project of substance was cofounding ReWork, a recruiting firm centered around meaningful work, with two friends. ReWork came out of my fellowship at the Unreasonable Institute, a social venture accelerator program which has since become the Unreasonable Group. ReWork helped nonprofits, social enterprises, foundations, and other impact-driven organizations hire the best talent. I was CEO for the first few years of operation. ReWork was acquired by Koya Leadership Partners in 2017.
During and after college I started several businesses and enterprising projects, most notably Hired Hands, a simple service of hiring friendly recent college grads (starting with me and my friends). We built the business on Craigslist, made tens of thousands of dollars over the course of a few seasons and – most importantly – had a lot of fun and experienced many interesting stories helping the people of Pittsburgh that hired us.
My first experience with business was a “turnaround” of the University of Vermont's newspaper, The Cynic. I took the business manager job from a friend who was uninspired by it. Over the course of two years I rebuilt a team of sales reps, overhauled the workflows for ad sales, and put the Cynic back on strong business footing. We went from having -$25K in our student government bank account, to be being profitable with a balance of $200K when I graduated.