I was born in Los Angeles, but a lot of my childhood happened an ocean away in Malaysia. When I moved back to LA for the last two years of high school, I was technically coming “home,” but it did not feel like home.

I showed up as the new FOB kid, fresh off the boat, with the wrong accent, the wrong references, and no friends. Lunchtime was the worst. I would 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 that open was not a big speech or some perfectly cinematic moment. It was band.

My parents had signed me up for classical piano when I was five and never really given me a choice. I complained about it often, but when I got back to LA, that forced discipline quietly became the bridge I needed. I joined jazz band on piano at 6:40 a.m., picked up French horn for band after school, and suddenly there was a room where I belonged and a group of people.

Academically, I was not a success story either. I bombed my placement tests. At 15, my counselor told me I probably would not graduate, let alone make it to college. It was blunt and it hurt, but it also flipped a switch. I did not argue. I just built a schedule.

Mornings in band. Days in class. Afternoons in orchestra. Community college classes at night. Tutoring whenever I could fit it in. It was not glamorous, but it was honest, and it got me to a diploma. More importantly, 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 and 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 is a clear thread in hindsight.

I got a job at a toy company, 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. Then, I started my own creative agency to work on all things design, specifically, in 2012, the AR wave that snapchat created. Later, prompted by the election of 2016, 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 life.

In 2018, I moved to New York and built an educational startup called Tactile Brain (DBA Abakidz) to help students confront their fear of math. A few years and a pandemic later, I joined an executive search firm and spent my days headhunting for VC and private equity backed, growth stage companies, which was like a live case study in how talent shapes enduring organizations.

Today, I spent 20% of my time on Keywest Logistics and 80% of my time on HeirLight, a simple and smart Will maker.

Service and philanthropy have never really been a separate lane for me. They have always been braided into the work.

Through Rotary International and its foundation, I traveled the world to raise funds for causes like polio eradication and over 50+ local community projects. I helped lead humanitarian efforts in places like Colombia and Mexico, and worked on initiatives closer to home with homeless communities in Los Angeles. I have also supported arts projects, because I think stories, music, and images change people long before policy does.

During the war in Ukraine in 2022, I helped build and advise projects focused on refugee housing, medical transportation, equipment, and the practical needs that appear when people are forced to move overnight. In May 2022, in Latvia, I found myself speaking on a panel about humanitarian aid for Ukraine. Sitting next to me on stage was Iryna Bushmina, who would become my life partner.

Co-founding Big West Rotaract was my way of trying to make that spirit of service more systematic. We built a 501c3 to help train the next generation of strategic philanthropists and ran events across seven states with over 3,000 members. The idea was simple: if more young people learn how to move money, time, and attention toward the right problems, a lot of things downstream get better.

Nothing makes me happier than sharing stories of people, places, small details, and my love for photography and video in the hope they nudge someone to see differently.

At this point in life, 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 are still on it.

If something here resonates with you, I hope it lingers.