My path here has been rather non-linear.
I was born to missionary parents and spent my childhood moving across Japan, Southeast Asia, and East Africa before immigrating to the United States at sixteen. Entrepreneurship showed up early, long before I had language for it. At eight, I sold candy and stuffed animals to classmates. At ten, at a crowded Tokyo flea market, I turned a single dollar into an electric guitar through a full day of bartering. My twin brother spent his money on candy. We both learned something.
As a teenager, the ventures became more serious and more strange. I worked as a stilt-walking clown at Japanese festivals, sold balloon animals, and later went door-to-door selling calendars. At fifteen, I moved to East Africa and traveled solo across five countries. That chapter included malaria, an armed robbery, and a brief stint in a border jail due to an expired visa. It was, as educations go, both unconventional and effective.
At sixteen, I moved to the U.S., finished high school early, earned a GED, and started my first company. I taught myself to code, built websites for friends and family, and gradually turned that work into a digital agency. The business was profitable, but it taught me a crucial lesson early, selling time, no matter how efficiently, does not scale.
That realization pulled me toward home services. In 2009, while trying to book a house cleaner, I saw firsthand how large, fragmented, and technologically stagnant the category was. Software was nearly nonexistent, and customer experience lagged badly. That insight became Golden Shine, which I built over the next three years before selling the company to a private equity firm in my mid-twenties.
After the sale, I knew I wanted to stay in home services. After taking roughly a week off, I started Lawn Love. Once accepted into Y Combinator, the company scaled quickly. We raised capital from investors including Joe Montana, Alexis Ohanian, and the Pritzker family, and spent the next seven years building and operating a labor-intensive business through extreme seasonality, operational complexity, and sustained growth. In 2021, Lawn Love merged with Lawnstarter, creating the largest lawn and garden marketplace in the country.
Today, I'm building Cabana, a tech-enabled roll-up in pool service. It's the synthesis of everything I've done before, deep experience in software and growth systems combined with years spent operating blue-collar, human-powered businesses at scale. It's an opportunity to apply modern technology to a category that desperately needs it, without losing sight of the day-to-day work that actually creates value.
Along the way, I've had the opportunity to guest lecture at Harvard Business School, sharing both our novel approach to building a venture-backed roll-up in pool services and the less glamorous realities of building companies that are meant to last.
After more than fifteen years in home services, I remain deeply optimistic about these "boring" industries. They are enormous, resilient, and still early in their adoption of technology. That gap is where I like to build.
