I like to say that my first startup was in 2nd grade. My dad's boss gave me a 5 gallon tin of flavored popcorn for Christmas. I wasn't a fan, but everyone in school was, so I packaged and sold them at lunch. My parents were mortified when they found out, mostly because that was a terrible thing to do with a gift. My dad's boss, an entrepreneur himself, was thrilled and encouraged me to keep at it.Years later I got a PhD in Particle Theory because it was the hardest thing I could think of doing. The further you go into a lot of disciplines, the narrower they get, but theoretical physics was the opposite: you had to be a generalist to be successful. I took ideas from all over physics, pieced them together to tell a story, and told it through equations. I had to structure exceedingly diverse and complex problems by boiling them down to cartoon pictures. As a PhD, I found a job as an expert in a diverse group as a big data scientist. It took being the expert for me to realize that I didn’t want to be the expert. Rather I desired being the ultimate generalist, connecting diverse groups of experts, seeing trends where others don’t, and pulling these together into something wonderful.This isn’t the easiest passion to find an outlet for, but I found it in startups. I used the same cartoon pictures to help brilliant faculty commercialize everything from new materials, integrated circuits, algorithms, drugs and medical devices. The number of iterations allowed me to refine my technology tastes: I like patent backed, disruptive technologies that are outside the standard approach to the problems they solve.The companies I’ve since founded are very much in product development stage and moving towards market. My role remains to build teams of experts and become the engine that drives them, setting the strategy and vision, and executing on it. When asked what I do, I often respond, “I make things go.”