I wasn’t supposed to make it here

I’ve never really introduced myself here. So here goes.

Before I was a founder…I was a 3x dropout. A roofer. A hospital operating room assistant cleaning blood between surgeries. A factory worker who could shingle half a house faster than two guys combined.

I went to college to play baseball. Dropped out. Went back. Flunked out again. I didn’t fail because I wasn’t smart...I failed because I didn’t believe I could be.

At one point I was living back at home, broke, unsure, and working two jobs— One in an operating room, the other drug testing people— while trying to make school work one last time.

That’s when everything shifted.

I found organizational psychology. I learned what makes people tick. What motivates them. And I became obsessed with one question:

How do we make work actually work?

From there, I fell in love with learning. Earned my degree. Graduated with a thesis on the Happy Productive Worker Thesis. And finally stepped into the corporate world.

I went from staffing recruiter → to team lead → to the guy management gave their lowest performers to fix. Four out of five turned into strong reps. One became a top recruiter.

I thought I was finally on the path. Then one misunderstanding about a candidate submission spiraled into something bigger— My integrity was questioned. And despite everything I’d given to the company, I wasn’t believed.

So I left.

I went into business process analysis at a management consultant. Mapped org charts, business processes, and workflows. Learned SharePoint from the inside—built complex workflows that required certain code—and how broken internal systems really are. Then bounced from the management consulting firm because it stifled every bit of my curiosity and voice. Literally, I was told not to talk in my cubicle.

Eventually, I landed at a startup. Built their intranet from scratch. Connected teams spread across Charlotte, Virginia, India, and remote. Before the pandemic even hit, I saw what distributed work could be—and what it was missing.

I was promoted to PMO lead. Built the software development life cycle. Then the newly hired head of engineering came in and "rebuilt it"—slapped new labels on the same thing. I got laid off two days before Christmas.

So I started a drop shipping business just to survive. Made a few thousand. Paid the bills. Finished my Executive MBA.

Then I got the opportunity of a lifetime: I joined Qumu, a publicly traded company, as an Executive in Training. Soon I was leading OKRs for the entire org. Then sales operations. Then sales engineering. Then enablement.

All while working 100% remote.

And that’s when I saw it clearly:

The tools weren’t working. The systems were disconnected. People were drowning in Slack, SharePoint, Outlook, Salesforce, Lattice, Notion, Zoom, Marketo, and more— and still no one knew what was going on or where to find anything.

The first time I used the words "virtual office" were when trying to figure out how we could leverage Qumu to build out own platform. Didn't workout the best, but got the job done.

So...

That’s where Grapevine began.

Not from an idea. From lived experience.

We didn’t build Grapevine to ride a trend. We built it because we’ve been inside the mess.

Because I know what it’s like to feel lost at work. To be the one who’s trying to make sense of it all—without the tools or trust to do it well.

Grapevine isn’t just a product. It’s the thing I wish existed at every stage of my journey. From the OR floors to the boardroom. From the roofing crews to the remote teams across time zones.

It’s built for the forgotten middle. The people doing the work but still left out of the loop. The leaders trying to align their teams without 15 tools open. The employees just trying to find what they need without asking for it 3 times.

Grapevine is the Virtual Office I always needed.

One place to communicate. One place to find what matters. One place to actually feel connected to your company again.

And I’m building it with everything I’ve got.

Thanks for being here. This is just the beginning.

#FounderStory #WorkRedesign #DigitalHQ #BuiltFromExperience #FutureOfWork #InternalComms #KnowledgeManagement #EmployeeExperience