Endeavors Archive

When we started Troops, we wanted to reimagine how work gets done. We wanted to make work easier, more intelligent, and more collaborative. In 2016 we launched our first product making that vision a reality by injecting mission-critical, actionable workflows into a new medium people were gravitating towards.  We brought our first product to life and shared it with the world: Troops is a Slackbot …

Like all startup beginnings, the earliest days of TULA were filled with a lot of emotions. For me personally, some words that come to mind are things like “depressed” “anxious” and “lost”. After all, I spent about a year and a half wandering the desert trying to figure out what I wanted to work on for my next business.  During this time, I started to …

Yes, I had $2 million dollars locked away on a crypto-hard wallet that I couldn’t access because of a forgotten password. But let’s start from the beginning… In 2013 I started to learn everything I could about the world of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. It was clear that a new “internet of money” was being born. I started reading, writing, buying, and experimenting with the world …

Starting anything new can be scary. Where do I begin? What if it doesn’t work? What if I fail? What will other people think of this? What will they think of me? These are questions I hear far too often and the advice I give to people pretty much revolves around a few basic ideas: Just do it. Do it with awesome people. You’ll figure …

At 6:20am in a coffee shop you fully expect to hear things like, “Hi sir, what can I get for you today.” Instead I heard a loud car crash followed by a blood-soaked woman screaming at the top of her lungs… “Help! Help! My boyfriend’s been shot. Help!” All heads in the coffee shop turn towards the windows… I got out of the Starbucks line …

I just finished up my National Ski Patrol refresher over the weekend. This is the 12th year I’ll be volunteering as a patroller at Mount Snow Vermont. For those of you that don’t know what ski patrol is or what we do, you can think of it as an EMT on skis or in my case a snowboard that is primarily responsible for the immediate …

This post originally appeared on Badger Engineers. My company Spinback was recently acquired by Buddy Media, the largest Facebook Management Company in the world. It’s clear that my four years studying in the Wisconsin College of Engineering has played a role in that acquisition. At the core, I’d argue that an engineering, math, or science related degree is the single best degree or use of …

Now that the dust has settled a bit and the acquisition is done, I wanted to talk a little bit about Dogpatch Labs NYC and the role they played in Spinback. 1. Collaboration For the past few months the Spinback team has been working out of a union square loft in NYC hosted by Polaris Ventures. We have been working alongside 15 – 20 other …

As the news says, today my partners and I over at Spinback are pleased to announce that we’ve been acquired by Buddy Media, the Facebook management system of choice for eight out of the ten top global advertisers. When we started Spinback the goal was to build the most cutting edge technology that would facilitate conversations and sharing of products. More importantly, we wanted this technology …

The situation in Japan is really horrible but perhaps an even worse situation is that rescue workers and aids are afraid to help those within a 12 mile radius of the nuclear power plant. Aid agencies are reluctant to get too close to the plant. Shelters set up in the greater Fukushima area for “radiation refugees” have little food, in part because nobody wants to …