For six years, I chased one title: Vice President. I started in investment banking, working on AMD’s $50 billion acquisition of Xilinx, then joined True Wind Capital, a tech-focused private equity firm. VP is the level where the job finally pays off, with real compensation, carried interest, and a path to partner. It’s also where a lot of people don’t make it. I got there a year early, the only person at the firm to do so, and became the youngest portfolio company board member in its history.

For six years, I chased one title: Vice President. I started in investment banking, working on AMD’s $50 billion acquisition of Xilinx, then joined True Wind Capital, a tech-focused private equity firm. VP is the level where the job finally pays off, with real compensation, carried interest, and a path to partner. It’s also where a lot of people don’t make it. I got there a year early, the only person at the firm to do so, and became the youngest portfolio company board member in its history.

Then I quit.

The reason was something I built along the way. Frustrated by how much of a PE investor’s day goes to chasing documents and rebuilding context, I built an AI system that pulled together the firm’s deals, emails, and meeting notes into one living brain. It became True Wind’s system of record. The whole investment team now runs on it, and analysts build their own AI agents on top of it. Once I saw what it could do for one firm, staying in the golden handcuffs stopped making sense.

Now I advise PE firms and their portfolio companies on AI strategies and build them solutions to compete in an increasingly competitive field.

Now I’m building it for every PE firm, with two technical cofounders: the infrastructure and AI agents that let a firm and its portfolio companies operate with a fraction of the manual work.

I grew up in Honolulu watching my dad run his own businesses, played D1 volleyball at Pepperdine, and trained for Ironman triathlons while working a full-time PE job. I’ve always been drawn to the hard path. This is the hardest one yet.