My first job after graduating from Princeton in 2004 was as a Director of an SAT prep company - managing 3 of its locations from soup to nuts. It was a crash course in small business management and I loved every second. It happened to be the year that the SAT was changing from the 1600 scale to the 2400 scale and I had a hypothesis that a lot of students in NY would want to take the ACT as a back up. I told the owner I wanted to write ACT prep curriculum for the company; he thought I was crazy and that no one in NY would ever take the ACT.

For whatever reason, I had this gut feeling and quit and spent about 6 months bartending at night and writing ACT prep curriculum during the day and launched my first business, The Edge in College Prep.

It turns out that my hunch was right (now more students take the ACT than the SAT :) and because we were one of the early companies offering ACT prep in NY we grew faster than I could have ever imagined.

I then went on to found two tech companies - Golfmatch, which was acquired by TopGolf and Admittedly, which is now owned by ACT, who rebranded it as myOptions.

In each one of my businesses, I always wished I had more time to focus on the product, our brand, my community, our content, my team, and our partners. But as a founder, you’re required to wear more hats than you can possibly manage, and oftentimes your company’s “mechanics” - finance, accounting, ops, HR, fulfillment, production, infrastructure, systems, data - get put on the back burner to the detriment of your company’s long-term success.

I had worked with several outsourced CFOs, but felt they were all glorified accountants who didn’t really understand my business, its long-term goals, or the operational changes I needed to make in the short-term to hit my long-term targets.

I decided to build what I was never able to find as a founder.

We started to offer holistic operational finance for consumer brands under $15M in revenue and then after helping several of our clients with fundraising (building financial projections and investor decks and accompanying them on pitches), we met several pre-launch founders looking for fundraising assistance as well.

We quickly realized that so many of our clients had made some pretty costly mistakes in terms of how they allocated their initial funds and wished we could have met them sooner - when they first had their idea. And thus, our “Business in a Box” solution was born.

Being an entrepreneur has been the source of so much freedom and happiness in my life and my goal is to take the fear out of launching your business so that you can experience the magic of entrepreneurship.

Investments