00Finance·2005 to 2009
Numbers first.
2005 to 2009Photo coming: the finance years
My first job out of college in 2005 was investment banking at a boutique, research-driven tech bank, followed by operations at JPMorgan Chase. On the side, in 2006, I started a personal finance blog, The Zen Capitalist, which is where I first learned what it takes to get a stranger to read something. Those years taught me to read a business through its numbers, and then 2008 showed me how fast those numbers can stop working. I decided I'd rather run a business than analyze one.
01Tuttimelon·2010 to 2015
Two storefronts and a stack of credit cards.
At 26, 2 partners and I opened a frozen yogurt shop in the Vintage Faire Mall in Modesto, funded with savings and credit cards, then a second one at Fashion Fair in Fresno. Over 5 years we hired and trained 30+ people and built a supply chain out of the Central Valley, and I did all of the marketing myself. The Modesto Bee named us Best New Dessert Shop. Fresno closed in 2013 and Modesto in 2015, and both times the thing that beat us was mall rent. The lease taught me more than the award did.
The full Tuttimelon story → 02Marketing for hire·2012 to 2013
Other people's businesses, same instincts.
While the stores were still open, other people started paying me to do what I'd been doing for myself. I built a network of EDM music blogs, which taught me distribution and SEO with my own time on the line. In 2012, San Jose Options, an options-trading education company, hired me as Director of Marketing, Digital. Then WODshop, an e-commerce shop in LA, brought me on as a consultant, and within 3 months traffic was up 150%, the conversion rate was 50% above the industry standard, and revenue had doubled. Up to this point every dollar I'd managed was either mine or a small company's, and every result had my name on it.
The WODshop numbers → 03Pop Up Gelato·2014 to 2018
Tabletop gelato stations that pop up anywhere.
In January 2014, my partners and I started Pop Up Gelato in San Francisco with a simple idea: tabletop gelato stations, quick to set up anywhere. Within a couple of years we were the Bay Area's mobile gelato bar, working from Napa to Santa Cruz and down to LA and Orange County, for Google, Genentech, Stanford, SpaceX, and Tesla, where we served 12,000 employees across the Fremont plant and the Palo Alto HQ over multiple days, and got asked back. We added gelato carts, and then I spun up Pop Carts, an ice cream cart rental business, with carts wrapped for Supergoop, Marc Jacobs, and Henry's Hard Soda. On August 31, 2018, Phthalo Investments bought both. 4 years and 7 months, first scoop to acquisition.
Pop Up Gelato on Crunchbase → 04Jade Orchard·2013 to now
The client's seat, from the other side.
I joined Jade Orchard in July 2013, 6 months before the first gelato station and with a frozen yogurt store still open in Modesto. For the next 4 years I was both: the marketer running paid media for a San Francisco Bay Area agency with 400+ clients, and the owner spending his own money on the other side. Today I run paid across Google, Meta, and TikTok for schools, restaurants, and franchises. In 2017 Facebook brought me in, under NDA, to tell their ads team what breaks for media buyers. My title is Director of Marketing. The function, more every month, is marketing engineer: I build the systems the team runs on, and most of our reporting runs on agents I wrote.
05Building now·Nights and weekends
2 apps, AI in the loop.
Nights and weekends go to 2 apps. WalkSteady is a Mac app that steadies your webcam while you walk on a treadmill through Zoom calls. DailyDen is a chore app where kids finish real-world quests and earn XP (my kids are the QA team). Both were designed, built, and iterated with AI in the loop.
See what I'm building → 
