Built and scaled with Liberian officials, Chinese factory workers, American surgeons, and global startup founders.

Clinton Health Access Initiative

• Led the process that secured a $9M emergency World Bank grant, the first post-war donor funds the Ministry managed directly, which catalyzed $500M+ in downstream investment
• Started LEAP, a training program built to outlast me; it became the model for what is now Emerging Public Leaders, a pan-African nonprofit past 700 fellows
• Secured $3M for solar at off-grid clinics, then installed and serviced the systems in the field

I arrived in Monrovia in early 2007, a few years after a civil war that had run for most of two decades and left the country with almost no functioning health system. I was embedded inside the Ministry of Health as the work of rebuilding it from close to nothing was just beginning.

The work I'm proudest of there is the quietest. I started LEAP, a training program for mid-level Ministry staff, the people who actually run a health system day to day. The country had lost much of that layer, and you can't rebuild a ministry on advisers who fly home. LEAP was built to keep working without me, and it did. It became the model for the President's Young Professionals Program, which grew into Emerging Public Leaders, a pan-African nonprofit now past 700 fellows, led by Betsy Williams, who I worked alongside in those years. I started a training program. Other people made it last, which is the best thing that can happen to something you build.

The larger numbers came too. I contributed to Liberia's first post-conflict National Health Plan, helped identify a $280M national funding gap, and led the process that secured a $9M emergency World Bank grant, the first post-war donor money the Ministry managed directly. That grant catalyzed more than $500M in downstream health investment. I also secured $3M for solar power and connectivity at off-grid health facilities, and then went out with technicians to install and service the systems myself. The hardware was expensive, fragile, and hard to fix in the field. That problem became a company a few years later.

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One Degree Solar

• Founded the company; BrightBox launched as the best-selling solar home system on Kenya's competitive market
• ~25,000 systems and 20,000 lanterns deployed across East Africa, with full P&L ownership
• Backed by Schneider Electric and Kiva, distribution through Coca-Cola, featured on Al Jazeera's earthrise

The company started with a wrench in my hand and my feet in the dirt. In Liberia I'd gone out with technicians to install and service solar systems at off-grid health facilities, and I watched the same thing fail over and over: the hardware was expensive, fragile, and when it broke there was no one nearby who could fix it. The cost curves on LEDs, panels, and lithium-ion batteries were all bending at once, so a system could soon do far more for far less. The technology was ready. The market's mistake was building things an ordinary person couldn't own or keep running.

The field taught me something else, and it ran against the entire development consensus. When I asked people living off-grid what they actually wanted powered, they ranked it the same way again and again: charge my phone first, then a TV or radio, then lights. The development community was pouring money into solar lighting as a charitable good, a lantern handed out through an NGO. What people actually wanted was connection, and a little of the normal life the grid gives everyone else. So we built BrightBox around that, a multi-light solar home system that charged phones and ran a television, repairable by a local electrician with parts they could find. Not a lantern. The thing people actually told us they wanted.

It launched as the best-selling solar home system on Kenya's competitive market, and we put roughly 25,000 of them, plus about 20,000 lanterns, into homes across East Africa. I ran it end to end: full P&L, a team of about 25 plus a contract sales force, backing from Schneider Electric and Kiva, and distribution with Coca-Cola. We also built what I believe was the first SMS-based warranty and inventory system in African off-grid solar, so a customer in a village with no street address could register a product and get it serviced. The work was featured on Al Jazeera's earthrise.

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Formlabs

• Grew the medical vertical from one printer to the most widely used 3D printing platform in hospital and radiology labs, ~2% to 16% of revenue
• Built the medical resins, service plans, and RA/QA backbone from scratch; enabled dozens of partners' FDA-cleared devices, from solo founders to the big five
• Took USF Health's 3D-printed COVID swab from a phone call to a tested design in one week; 100M+ produced across 60+ countries

I came to Formlabs already fluent in the world it was trying to reach. I'd recently spent months inside hospitals as a parent rather than a professional, through a long stretch in a NICU, through surgeries, through the clinical literature you end up reading late at night to understand what's happening to your child. My oldest son has cerebral palsy and wears orthoses, and I'd seen up close how slow and expensive the assistive-device supply chain is. So when Formlabs, then a desktop 3D-printing company, set out to build a medical business, I understood both halves of it: the clinical side and the human one. The personal and the professional were never separate threads here.

When I joined, the medical vertical was one printer, the Form 2, and a handful of clients using it for prototyping. That was the whole of it, and for the first year or so I was the only person on it, the most senior person for medical and the only one dedicated to the vertical. Turning it into something hospitals and device makers could build on took a stack we built largely from scratch: Formlabs' own medical-grade resins, the printers and service plans around them, and the standards and RA/QA work behind all of it. I started on the business-development side and moved into Product as the unit grew and we built out a team. Before there was an in-house regulatory function, I represented the company on it directly, working with the FDA, with clinical societies like RSNA, and with the biocompatibility, sterilization, packaging, and validation labs that decide whether a printed part is safe to use on a patient.

The partnerships came out of the same effort. A collaboration I drove with Greenlight Guru produced a co-written e-book to help device makers through the regulatory path. The market ran from solo founders to the largest companies in medtech and biotech, and the model held across all of it: make Formlabs the platform a company could prototype, clear, and commercialize a device on. Dozens did, for FDA-cleared end-use devices, surgical instruments, orthopedic resection guides, orthognathic splints, sleep apnea devices. One startup we worked with reached its 510(k) in six months against a twelve-month commitment to its investors. The field moved too, toward the milestones that made the whole category viable, including the first CPT reimbursement codes for 3D-printed anatomical models and surgical guides. I didn't get those clearances or write those codes. The work was building the platform, the partnerships, and the standards that let other people get there faster, which is what I'd want to do for a portfolio now.

Then COVID hit, and the swab shortage with it. Dr. Summer Decker at USF Health called me directly, and over a single week in March 2020, USF Health, Northwell, Tampa General, and Formlabs went from the problem to a tested 3D-printed swab. The design was USF-patented and we were the printing partner; I drove our side of it. More than 100 million of those swabs were eventually produced across 60-plus countries, and the USF Health team received a USPTO Patent for Humanity for the design. It's the fastest I've ever watched a thing go from a phone call to something keeping people safe.

The clearest proof of why this mattered didn't come from a hospital at all. It came from a father in Slovenia named Matej Vlašič, who used a Formlabs printer to make an ankle-foot orthosis for his son Nik, who also has cerebral palsy. Thirteen prototypes, about $15 in materials, against the $5,000 or more a conventional brace can cost. That was the whole thesis in one family: put the tools in more hands, and the cost of helping someone walk falls by two orders of magnitude. The vertical I built grew from about 2% of revenue to 16%, inside a company now valued at $2B, profitable, past $250M in annual revenue, and the largest professional 3D printing firm founded since the 1980s.

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MassChallenge

• Rebuilt the 130-startup generalist flagship into sector-specific Traction programs; NPS rose from 33 to 74 (health & life sciences), 61 (security & resilience), 57 (climate)
• Cohorts more than doubled prior-year revenue and funding from 26% fewer companies: $96M revenue, $260M raised
• Built the data spine, CRM, and AI tools the programs run on, solo, while the remit grew to Marketing and co-leading tech

After Formlabs I spent a stretch consulting, for public tech companies, the Clinton Foundation's assistive technology initiative, and a handful of startups. MassChallenge, one of the oldest and largest startup accelerators in the world, brought me in as a consultant to rebuild its healthcare portfolio, then asked me to join full-time to run its Programs and Community teams. The fit was the point: the organization had run healthcare programs before but had nothing in the sector at the time, and the broader model was still industry-agnostic, exactly the gap I'd spent six years learning how to fill.

The flagship was mid-flight when I arrived, an industry-agnostic program running 130 startups. I did what I always do first: for a few months, until that program closed, I ran intentional interviews with everyone who had a stake in it, judges, mentors, corporate partners, applicants, staff, and founders. The generalist model was straining against what founders in regulated industries actually needed.

A few principles came out of that and shaped everything after: play in a few sectors rather than all of them, choose quality over quantity in the startups, mentors, and partners we took on, take the friction out of the tech so it was easier for everyone to work with us, and rebuild the brand to resonate with donors, corporate sponsors, and founders alike. The changes came in 2025. A new team, a new tech stack, and the fourteen-year generalist flagship rebuilt into sector-specific Traction programs in health, security and resilience, and climate. Net promoter scores climbed from 33 to 74 in health and life sciences, 61 in security and resilience, and 57 in climate. The cohorts got stronger too: more than double the prior year's revenue and funding from 26% fewer companies, $96M in cohort revenue and $260M raised. Fewer startups, better fit, better outcomes. My remit kept widening as it went, from Programs and Community to Marketing in mid-2025 as part of rebuilding that team, and finally to co-leading technology on my way out.

The piece I'd point a fund to is the network. An accelerator's real asset is the people around it, the mentors, experts, and partners who actually move a company forward, and that had been run informally. I rebuilt it into a system, so the right expert reaches the right founder by design rather than by luck. It's the closest thing I've done to portfolio operations at a venture firm.

Underneath it all is infrastructure I built myself: a data spine rebuilt from tangled, overlapping systems, a revamped contact database and CRM, and a set of AI tools I designed and shipped, among them a classifier that made fifteen years of portfolio data usable and a search tool the staff rely on daily. Most recently I've been in the field again, gathering requirements to redesign the accelerator software the organization runs on, which hasn't been overhauled since 2010. That work is the throughline into what I'm building now.

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