I was born in Los Angeles, but a lot of my childhood happened an ocean away in Malaysia. When I moved back for the last two years of high school, I was technically coming home. It didn't feel like it.

I showed up as the new kid with the wrong accent, the wrong references, and no friends. Lunchtime was the worst. I'd walk the perimeter of campus just to avoid the small calculations of where to sit, who to talk to, how to not look completely out of place.

The thing that cracked it open wasn't a cinematic moment. It was band. My parents had forced classical piano on me since I was five and never really given me a choice. I complained constantly. Then I got back to LA, joined jazz band at 6:40 a.m., picked up French horn after school, and suddenly there was a room where I belonged and a group of people who didn't care where I'd come from.

Academically, I wasn't a success story either. At 15, my counselor told me I probably wouldn't graduate, let alone make it to college. It was blunt and it hurt, but it flipped a switch. I didn't argue. I just built a schedule. Mornings in band. Days in class. Afternoons in orchestra. Community college at night. Tutoring whenever I could fit it in. It taught me that effort compounds long before anyone notices.

Since I didn't have the requirements to enroll in university, I started at a community college. There I took a job running financial aid seminars at local low-income high schools, sometimes giving talks about college access. It was the first time I felt the weight of my words on someone else's life. That feeling became a through-line.

Professionally, my path has zigzagged, but there's a clear thread in hindsight. I got a job at a toy company, then launched campaigns during the early wave of YouTube product placement marketing — helping brands and creators figure out how to work together before there was a playbook. I started my own creative agency focused on design, and in 2012 worked on the AR wave that Snapchat created. Prompted by the 2016 election, I left the private sector to work as Finance Deputy for the former California State Treasurer's gubernatorial campaign, learning how money, messaging, and trust intersect. In 2018 I moved to New York and built an education startup called Tactile Brain to help students confront their fear of math. A few years and a pandemic later, I joined an executive search firm headhunting for VC and private equity-backed growth-stage companies — a live case study in how talent shapes enduring organizations.

Today I spend most of my time on HeirLight, a guided will-making platform built in honor of my mother, who passed in 2024. It started as a conversation with my parents about clarity - what they had, what was enough, what they wanted to leave behind. It became a company.

Service has never been a separate lane. Through Rotary International I traveled the world raising funds for polio eradication and over 50 local community projects, led humanitarian efforts in Colombia and Mexico, and worked on initiatives with homeless communities in Los Angeles. I've supported arts projects too, because I think stories, music, and images change people long before policy does. Co-founding Big West Rotaract was my way of making that spirit more systematic — we built a 501c3 to train the next generation of strategic philanthropists and ran events across seven states with over 3,000 members.

During the war in Ukraine in 2022, I helped build and advise projects focused on refugee housing, medical transportation, and the practical needs that appear when people are forced to move overnight. In May 2022, speaking on a panel in Latvia about humanitarian aid, I met the woman who would become my life partner.

At this point I care less about titles and more about time: how we spend it, what we leave behind, and how we document the journey while we're still on it.

If something here resonates, I hope it lingers.