I've been on two wheels since before I could reliably walk. I grew up in Connecticut, where that meant finding the steepest hill around and pointing myself down it, and eventually it turned into a few years of racing downhill mountain bikes. It's a simple sport. You go down, you go fast, and you spend the whole run trying not to think about what happens if you get it wrong. I got my first motorcycle in high school and my endorsement at sixteen, and went from a Ninja to an R6. I've never been much of a distance rider. What I've always wanted are corners. Every so often the road and the bike and my own head all cooperate, and for a few seconds it's the best I ever feel. Going fast on my Royal Enfield Continental GT 650 is what makes me happy.

I moved to San Francisco after that to study photography, and spent more money than I should have on tricked-out two-stroke mopeds. That's a questionable choice in a city that steep, and it didn't slow me down. I bounced back and forth across the country for a few years afterward, long enough that I lost track of which coast I lived on, and eventually landed in Portland. A guitar came with me on every one of those moves and still takes up most of my evenings.

Portland is where I got into operations. I spent over ten years in manufacturing, running production facilities and eventually running companies. Early on, I was working mostly on instinct. What changed that was years alongside the Oregon Manufacturing Extension Partnership and a handful of mentors who schooled me properly in Lean, Six Sigma, project management, and leadership. That was a genuine before-and-after for me. What holds an operation back is almost never how hard people are working. It's tools that don't work, information that shows up late, or a team that doesn't feel secure enough to say so. Building the opposite of that, where the systems hold up, and people have enough safety and purpose to tell you what's in their way, is the part of this work I care most about. They always know where it breaks down, and asking them is still the first thing I do anywhere.

At Mosko, I look after distribution and build the systems behind it, which comes down to getting people the information they need when they need it, and making sure gear moves from production into a rider's hands without snagging along the way