Originally from the Atlanta area, at nineteen I enlisted as a private in the U.S. Army to serve our country and make something more of myself. Stationed in Korea, Germany, Kuwait, and Iraq, I provided communications support for the intelligence community, ensuring the right people had the right intel to make the right decisions in the field.
As a nineteen-year-old kid without much experience in life, the Army was transformational, providing purpose, direction, and motivation to achieve any goal I made for myself. It also shaped my working style: in the Army you don't get to pick your team and you don't get to wait for perfect conditions or complete information, you make do with what you've got to achieve the mission. I will bring that forward to City Council, working with anybody who is willing to partner to get things moving.
After the Army I attended Arizona State University and earned a degree in Information Systems before transitioning to my first corporate job as an internal auditor for American Express. Both the Army and Amex were big lessons in navigating bureaucracy effectively, and my time as an auditor taught me the value of the role. Auditors help organizations catch their mistakes and fix them, provide cover for people trying to change entrenched habits, and serve as an independent, unbiased opinion about what's working and what's not. On City Council I'll push hard to establish our first independent City Auditor to do just those things and help our government manage your tax dollars as effectively as possible.
From Amex I transitioned entirely into cybersecurity, helping organizations big and small protect themselves from online threats. A company is a big system made up of people, processes, and technology, and to secure it I needed to learn how those parts worked in concert. I will bring that ethos to City Council, learning how each part works together to ensure the changes we're making help improve the system as a whole. It's not enough to want change, we have to know how to implement it and what the second- and third-order effects of those changes are.
And that brings us here. Five years ago my wife, son, and I moved up to Boulder for the simple reason that it's awesome. Three years ago I started my own company to focus on helping small and midsized businesses with their security challenges. Through it all I've kept up on what's happening in our city and wondered why it seemed so hard to solve the problems that keep coming up: affordability, homelessness, our budget, and protecting our open space. I'm running for a council seat so we can start taking real action against these issues and to fix the root causes that have made them difficult to address in the first place.