Career highlights

Here is my career timeline without all the boring stuff like job titles, promotions, companies, revenue, and actual professional accomplishments.

1996: Hired by my mom at Judy Dias Photography. Nepotism pays off early.

1999: Began a promising career at Price Chopper, where I honed my geometry skills figuring out how to arrange groceries in a paper bag to maximize structural integrity and minimize the number of bags used.

2002: Founded the Wake Forest ski team in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, a state with exactly six ski areas and a city that averages about 7 inches of snow per year.

2006: Waited tables at Lucky 32. The first time I tried opening a bottle of wine, I sliced my finger on the foil and started bleeding onto the customer's white tablecloth. Never opened another bottle of wine.

2006: Started my first month as an investment banking analyst at PNC and decided to give myself a haircut. I forgot to put the guard on the clippers and carved a giant bald stripe into the back of my head.

2008: Left investment banking and moved to Japan to teach English. My dad supported the move emotionally. Financially, he had follow-up questions.

2010: Wrote a 234-page business plan for opening an indoor miniature golf business in Japan. 234 pages. About miniature golf.

2012: Quit my job to build software despite being entirely unqualified to build software.

2013: Begged for a teaching job because my exciting new startup life was producing approximately $0 in income and I was getting married in April.

2014: Directed a Toy Story play for my class of 2-year-old English students. One critic called it "the best Toy Story adaptation performed before nap time."

2016: Became a professional software developer despite never taking a computer science class. Told my wife that this time there would be actual money involved. For realzies.

2017: Invented a four-player strategy game called Cooperation Cube on a flight over Alaska. My career highlight if you ask me.

2018: A friend and former colleague bought a pediatric therapy company and asked if I could help with technology. I knew basically nothing about pediatric therapy, which has historically been a strong qualification for my career pivots.

2018–2021: Spent four years becoming dangerously fluent in speech therapy acronyms.

2023: Appeared on my first-ever podcast. It has since disappeared from the internet. Coincidence remains the leading theory.

2025: Restarted LinkedIn because they pinky-promised they wouldn't spam my entire address book this time.

2026: Published a book called The Problem-First Method. Then got called into an intervention for violating the core premise of my own book.

Anyway, that's the career.

Please endorse me on LinkedIn for Miniature Golf, Grocery Bagging, Questionable Career Decisions, Wine Bottle Delegation, and Executive Haircuts.