I started in 2007, at eighteen, with a mobile car wash in Seal Beach, California — me, a friend, and a couple of buckets. It wasn’t glamorous, but it taught me the only lesson that has mattered since: a business is just a series of problems, and the person who solves them wins.
The years after were a working education. I sold beef jerky on the road. I spent three years bidding public-works projects and running an equipment department for a builder in Stanton — where I learned logistics, procurement, and how physical operations actually run when the margins are thin and the deadlines aren’t.
In 2013 I started my first real company: The Runners, a courier service out of Los Alamitos. That same year I bought into a hookah lounge in Huntington Beach — Mirage — took full ownership, ran it, and sold it in 2018. Along the way, in 2014, I launched Alpaca Bowls, a manufacturing brand that still runs today. By 2015 I was exporting — building the relationship with Tangiers that would make me their exclusive Eastern Hemisphere exporter.
“A business is just a series of problems. I’ve spent seventeen years collecting the solutions.”
After selling Mirage and another small business, founders started asking how I’d done it — how to get a product manufactured, how to structure a first export deal, how to fix a fulfillment operation that was bleeding money. So I started consulting. Not from a textbook — from having actually made the mistakes and found the fixes.
Since then the ventures have kept coming: The Exotic Club, distributing foreign snacks and sodas across the U.S.; Culture Shrooms, a functional-mushroom brand with three retail locations; custom snack manufacturing including licensed cereals for recognized artists; Shrum and its Mikeadelics line with Mike Tyson; formulation work as a patent collaborator on an inhalable plant stem cell technology; and hands-on manufacturing and 3PL for other brands.
The newest chapter is AI. I build custom autonomous agents for businesses — and I don’t just advise on them, I ship them. The through-line hasn’t changed since the car wash: find the problem, build the solution, make it run.
