The work changed.
The question didn't.

I've rebuilt my career twice. Once because I was good at something that was slowly hollowing me out. And then again because the people I was trying to help needed more than I was qualified to give them.

My professional path began with a degree in UX design and human-computer interaction. At the time, that meant understanding how people move through systems: what confuses them, what they actually need, and why the two are so rarely the same thing. I didn't know it then, but I've been working on that question ever since.

From there, I built a career in customer experience. I started with night shifts on the floor, eventually leading CX operations for the entire company.

After that company was acquired, I started working within the early-stage startup ecosystem at Techstars, first as a business associate with product/CX experience, then as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence. I worked across every domain a business has: product, operations, business development, and fundraising. Eventually I launched my own boutique consulting firm and helped clients raise north of $30M from pre-seed through Series A, getting them from 0 to 1 on all levels of company building.

I was also working seventeen-hour days, had stopped sleeping properly, and had quietly abandoned every version of a life outside the work. When I finally looked up, the results were real and the cost was obvious. I wound it down.

(You could keep reading. Or we could skip straight to the part where we actually talk.)

What I wanted to do next was clear, once I was honest about it. The part of the work I'd actually valued was the 1:1 time with founders — not the operations, not the overhead. Just being with someone while they figured something out. So I went back to coaching.

And over and over, the same thing happened.

We'd be fifteen minutes into a conversation about fundraising strategy, and someone would say something about their co-founder, or their marriage, or their father — and the session would shift into something else entirely. Genuine interest in someone's pain is not the same as being trained to do something useful with it. I knew the difference, and I knew which one I had.

I'd make referrals — good therapists, people I trusted. The response was almost always the same: I don't have time. I've tried it and they don't get what I do. The second I bring up a funding round, I'm spending twenty minutes explaining my job instead of doing any work.

I heard that enough times that I stopped arguing with it.

I enrolled at NYU Silver School of Social Work, trained across CBT, psychodynamic and relational therapy approaches, and pursued couples therapy training at the Relational Life Institute. I got the degree and came back—not as a coach, but soon, as a clinician. The same working knowledge of what a Series B crunch actually feels like. Now the clinical tools to go somewhere useful with it.

The last chapter is still being written.

Around the time I was finishing my clinical training, generative AI started doing things that caught almost everyone off guard. Given where I started—studying how humans interact with systems—I found myself less surprised than most and more curious than I expected. I started thinking seriously about what this means for the field: how clinicians can use it to sharpen their practice, how clients are already using it in ways that show up in the room whether or not anyone names it. I started building at that intersection, and I started speaking about it to mental health and entrepreneurship communities alike.

I didn't anticipate half of where this work has taken me. I didn't expect to become a couples therapist. I didn't expect to find myself genuinely moved by the work of sitting with a seventeen-year-old navigating something they don't have language for yet. I followed the same advice I give anyone stepping into unfamiliar territory: approach with curiosity and an open mind. The results have generally astounded me.