Short Bio

I am 21 year old entrepreneur currently in living in my hometown of San Francisco. I spend most of my time these days obsessed with growing the Startup Genome into a successful company. The Startup Genome Project is a startup I co-founded in February 2011 to increase the success rate of startups and accelerate the pace of innovation and economic growth around the world. 

In my respites from the entrepreneurial roller coaster, I study philosophy, psychology, spirituality, innovation, and complex developmental systems. I have a burning desire to find order in chaos, understand why we do things and figure out where we are going. I believe strongly in holism, so when I’m not typing away at the computer or burying my head in a book, I practice honing my physical craft, taking on challenges like meditation, break dancing and interval training.

I enjoy exploring my thoughts through written form, passionate discussion, and relationships that support mutual growth.

Longer Bio

I am a 21 year old San Francisco native, driven by working on the biggest problems I can find. As a teenager I immersed myself in ideas and communities exploring the implications of an accelerating technologically driven society. I identified the high failure rate of startups as the key bottleneck to a continued accelerating pace of technological innovation and human flourishing. After two years of learning from living dead experiments and a 6 week excursion as a Stanford Freshman, I dropped out and the Startup Genome was born.

The Startup Genome began as a search for a scalable way to accelerate startups and a means to catalyze the era of  the Entrepreneurial Enlightenment.  We were inspired by the explosion of entrepreneurship all around the globe and excited by research rolling in that validated our intuition. In 2010, the Kauffman Foundation published a landmark study that showed U.S. Job Growth was driven almost entirely by startups.

Today, the Startup Genome project aims to crack the code of innovation and increase the success rates of startups. Together with researchers from UC Berkeley, Oxford, and Stanford, and entrepreneurial thought leaders like Steve Blank the Startup Genome team has published two research reports on what makes startups successful that have been downloaded more than 25,000 times and have been adopted globally by more than 50 Universities, Incubators & Accelerators. More recently the Startup Genome team has released the Startup Genome Compass, the first digital mentor for now more than 12,000 startups from around the world.

In my respites from the entrepreneurial roller coaster, I study philosophy, psychology, spirituality, productivity, innovation, and complex developmental systems, born from a burning desire to find order in chaos, understand why we do things and figure out where we are going.

I enjoy exploring my thoughts through written form, passionate discussion, and relationships that support mutual growth.

Together with my cofounder, Bjoern Lasse Herrmann, we run the local bay area community for Sandbox, a global network of change makers. I have been writing semi-regularly on my blog since 2008.

Like Theseus, I am trying to leave a trail to find my way back through the labyrinth. Here is my ball of string for my intellectual development and more about my personal journey can be found here.

MORE ABOUT ME

Best posts on the blog 

Press & Testimonials 

Frameworks

My Principles, Patterns and Values 

My Project / Work history is most accurately reflected on my LinkedIn Profile.  

And here is a 3rd Person Bio for use in publications

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