Entrepreneur, advisor, writer, and philosopher
I build and operate ecommerce businesses, advise companies on digital commerce and logistics, and write about business, technology, history, and ideas.
My work is grounded in practical experience: developing products, building companies, managing, marketing, and technology, improving fulfillment operations, and solving the many problems that emerge when virtual commerce meets the physical world.
Stoicism, Epicureanism, and the Entrepreneurial Life
A three-part essay series on work, ambition, flourishing, and the founder’s search for enough.
A career built around engaging difficult problems
For more than twenty years, I have worked in product design and sourcing, marketing and advertising, inventory management, warehousing, shipping, coaching staff, and satisfying customers. Today, my work combines entrepreneurship and technology, driven by an insatiable curiosity about how things are invented, systematized, remembered, and improved.
“The surest path to success is to start now and to figure it out as you go. You can’t learn to drive in a parked car.”
What I Do
Build and operate companies
I am the founder and owner of businesses in the memorial products industry, including Stardust Memorials and Reflections Urns & Memorials. I am also a partner and member of the board with eFulfillment Service, a leading ecommerce fulfillment company.
Advise on ecommerce & logistics
From time to time, I work with business owners and managers who need experienced help with digital commerce, fulfillment, shipping, inventory, advertising, technology, or operational decisions. My consulting is practical, focused, and based on experience inside real businesses.
Create things to solve problems
My interests extend beyond my business life. I think and write about philosophy, technology, genealogy, history, and the art and science of creating things. I am a thinker who solves problems.
Consulting
I occasionally provide hourly consulting in two principal areas:
Digital commerce
I help businesses think through ecommerce strategy, advertising, product feeds, analytics, marketplace selling, software choices, merchandising, and operational growth.
Logistics and fulfillment
I advise on warehouse processes, inventory systems, picking and packing, shipping costs, carrier decisions, order management, and the integration of ecommerce and fulfillment technology.
I am often most useful when a business faces a complicated decision, a persistent operational problem, or a need for an experienced second opinion.
Writing and ideas
I have spent much of my life moving between practical business problems and more theoretical and existential questions.
My academic background is in analytic philosophy, but my interests range widely. I often write about whatever topics engage my imagination, so my work is eclectic.
Projects and interests
Not everything worth doing fits neatly into a professional biography.
In general, I find that I pursue things that are complex and difficult to master. Outside of work, I am interested in genealogy and historical research, especially the recovery of family stories from incomplete and sometimes contradictory records. I am interested in visual art, especially printmaking and photography, modern architecture and design, food and cooking, jazz, the Cold War and the Space Race, board games, dogs, and vintage things. I build miniature book nooks, play guitar, fish with a fly rod, and attempt to play golf.
“The best way to predict the future is to create it.”
– Peter Drucker