My first vocabulary was operational. I was a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division, deployed to Afghanistan, and technology there was never abstract. It was the radio that reached or didn’t, the sensor that saw or missed, the piece of kit that worked when someone’s life leaned on it.
That standard (does it work, here, under these conditions) outlasted the uniform. It still quietly grades everything I do.
My second was analytical. At Recorded Future I tracked state-sponsored operations from China, North Korea, Iran, and Russia in the Strategic and Persistent Threats Group: more than 20 intelligence reports on advanced persistent threat actors, over 400 private-sector breaches assessed, and a whitepaper on the financial risks of cyber compromise, co-authored with the firm’s CSO.
At Boeing Defense, Space & Security I read whole regions for a company whose products take a decade to build: go-to-market and risk strategy for allied EMEA markets, including the Turkish UAV and aerospace sector.
The two jobs taught the same discipline from opposite ends. Intelligence compresses the world into a decision. Strategy stretches a decision across the world.
My third vocabulary was commercial, and I had to found something to learn it properly. Forward Horizon Group, the veteran-led defense consultancy I co-founded in 2023, started from one conviction: credible analysis has to be grounded in field validation. It grew from a two-person operation into a practice serving operators, investors, and primes across the transatlantic and Indo-Pacific defense innovation ecosystems.
The work meant more than 30 trips to Ukraine and 15 to Taiwan, 8 Ukrainian oblasts, over 500 stakeholder interviews. Out of that fieldwork came the Ukraine–Taiwan Defense Innovation Corridor framework.
A chapter leading business development at Cracken AI, a Ukrainian-founded cybersecurity company forged defending critical infrastructure against Russian nation-state attacks, showed me the same seam from the vendor’s side.
All of that now sits at Palisade Bergschrund, where I’m Managing Partner, Research & Technology. Alongside the firm, I convene the New York National Security Forum, which I co-founded, and SoCal Deep Tech Week.
The scholarship came in layers, each one bought with practice. International relations at Columbia, with a State Department Gilman Scholarship summer of Mandarin at Peking University; that summer was the bridge between the uniform and the analytical career that followed. International business at Fletcher, a program built to be interdisciplinary from the ground up: business fundamentals paired with a global affairs field, on the premise that markets and statecraft have to be read together. Cybersecurity risk and strategy at NYU, jointly conferred by the School of Law and the Tandon School of Engineering. The Cambridge Security Initiative’s International Security and Intelligence Programme, focused on cyber and information operations.
And now the doctorate in Defence Studies at King’s College London, under Professor Christopher Kinsey. Innovation Under Fire examines how defense innovation actually happens under wartime conditions: the improvised, contested, socio-technical process by which new capabilities move from workshop to front line. Field cases in Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel.
One thread runs beneath the rest. The Warrior Scholar Project, an academic bootcamp that brings enlisted veterans into higher education, was part of my own arc before it became a service commitment. I went through it myself while still on active duty, just back from deployment. Since then I’ve taught in more than a dozen of its bootcamps and now sit on its Alumni Advisory Board. It’s the same translation, done for people: soldiers learning the academy’s vocabulary, the way I did.
The through-line, stated once: the most consequential emerging technologies are being proven where geopolitics and capital collide, and understanding them means standing in all three worlds and moving between them. The ground covered is on the Experience page.
I split my time among New York, London, Kyiv, and Taipei. Off the clock I’m a student of history and strategic thought, a film obsessive, and a listener whose tastes run from hip-hop and jazz to electronic and metal.
