I grew up outside Atlanta and enlisted in the United States Army at nineteen, partly to serve and partly because I wanted to become someone worth being. I spent my enlistment on active duty in Korea, Germany, Kuwait, and as part of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, where I was awarded the Bronze Star. My work was communications support for the intelligence community, making sure the right information reached the people in the field who needed it (nothing like getting sent to war to spark an interest in policy).
The Army taught me to work with the team I have. I didn't get to be picky about who showed up or what conditions I was handed, I just needed to accomplish the mission, and I've carried that forward ever since. I'll carry it onto council too: I'll work with anybody willing to do the work. It's also a relentlessly results-oriented organization, and that turns out to be the thread running through everything I've done since.
After my enlistment and a degree at Arizona State, I took my first real job as an internal auditor at American Express. People hear “auditor” and picture someone showing up to catch them. That isn't the job. The job is to ask what a program was supposed to accomplish, find out whether it did, and write the answer down somewhere anyone can check my work. Good auditors help an organization catch its own mistakes and fix them, and they give cover to the people inside who are trying to change an entrenched habit and can't do it alone. American Express, like the Army, measured everything, and both of them taught me how to really measure whether the work we were doing was effective.
From there I moved into cybersecurity, which I've been doing in some shape or form for around two decades, and three years ago I started my own firm serving small and midsized businesses. A company is a big system made of people, processes, and technology, and my work is repeatedly deconstructing intricate corporate processes in order to rebuild them leaner, simpler, and more secure. The unglamorous word for the rest of it is operations: somebody has to answer for how long a request sat in a queue, whether a control actually held when it got tested, and what got fixed after the last incident. Most of my clients had never had a number to point at. So I built them one, and then we closed the gaps it exposed on a clock. That is most of what I do for a living, and it is not complicated work. It's just work that somebody has to sit down and do.
My family and I moved to Boulder nearly six years ago, and I've watched the local drama unfold with interest ever since. What I see is a city that genuinely wants to do the right thing and then gets mired in its own bureaucracy or tripped up on the fundamentals like maintenance. I've watched friends run into walls trying to open a business. I watched a North Boulder neighborhood spend years trying to replace a playground. I've sat through the meetings where a good idea gets talked to death by people who all agree with each other.
A city is a big system made of people, processes, and technology too. That's the thing I want to bring to bear here: take it apart, find out what it's actually doing, put a number on it, and rebuild it so it works. I'm not running because I think Boulder is a lost cause, and I'm not running to tell you we can cut our way out of this, because I don't believe we can. I'm running because there's a gap between the city we want to be and the city we are, and I know I can fix it.