A bit about me:
I’m a partner at Avenir. I’ve wanted to be an investor since I was 12 years old and wake up excited to learn about the world, building conviction and apply it every day. Outside of investing, I love heretical ideas, sunken treasure, writing, strategy games, dry-aged steaks, visualizing data, fierce debates, scatterplots and anything that counts as adventure. I run a small pickup soccer league in lower Manhattan and host the NY chapter of a regular group discussion/presentation series called Nosh ‘n Nerd.
More about me:
I’m from a small town in Northern Maine where my family has owned and operated a general store since 1914. Growing up, I worked with my father and grandfather doing whatever needed to be done: repairing the roof, cashiering, stocking shelves and (my favorite) demolishing anything that needed to be knocked down.
When I was twelve, my father handed me the brokerage login to my college savings and I started investing in stocks. My first three were a biotech company, an oil driller and a shipwreck hunting company. By my sophomore year, I was running a two-hundred-person message board on Yahoo! Finance to discuss the treasure hunting outfit’s travails as a public company. I didn’t make much money in the end (courtesy of the Spanish government winning a large treasure in court), but I did become addicted to studying businesses and trying to get to the cutting edge of them.
At Harvard, I found my way onto the board of the investment club, spent an inordinate amount of time on stock pitch competitions and thriving off of the raw intellectual debates that investments represent. I majored in economics but I thrived on different perspectives, taking classes in philosophy, gender studies and sociology. Especially, I loved arguing late into the night with archaeology students about the ethics of selling sunken treasure.
After graduating, I’ve been fortunate to have a wide variety of investing roles as my own personal style came together. At Putnam, I fell in love with software companies and learned to think like a scaled, long-term investor. At Matrix, I learned the ins and outs of early-stage venture- from sourcing deals to partnering with founders. At Coatue, I learned about how to invest with an eye on productizing and the criticality of dreaming big and executing ruthlessly against the top priorities on any given day.
The culmination/synthesis of those experiences is my current role as a partner at Avenir, where I focus on investing in high-growth, B2B startups. I love building a holistic view of the world, powered by both experience and data, doing deep fundamental research on areas of change and debate and then investing in the companies that most deserve incremental capital and support given the outcomes of that research. I am beyond fortunate to be doing work I love with people I admire every day.
