Tell us about your connection to Bentley.

Where to start?...I met my lovely wife Katie at Bentley. I played ultimate frisbee on the men’s team; Katie played on the women’s team. We met on the field freshman year, were just friends, then started dating after college. We are a proud Bentley couple.

I knew the moment I stepped onto campus Bentley was the right school for me. Along with being a great business school, it’s a place where students clearly enjoy their time. When I visited it was a beautiful day on the Greenspace with frisbees flying. Even though I had a bigger scholarship to another school, it was the right fit for me. Bentley is where I vowed to start my own business, learned the skills to do it, and met the people who would help me along the way.

As an alumnus, I have been a coach and speaker in the Entrepreneurship Hub. I presented with a group of fellow alumni on running your own business at the Alumni Conference. I have also been part of an alumni group of business owners started by a Bentley professor. We all run businesses and started them pretty early in our careers, so we help each other navigate those waters. I enjoy adding value where I can, and Bentley has continued to be a great resource and community for me.

Before talking about business, tell us a bit about Ultimate Frisbee. What drew you to the sport?

It is a fast-moving game that flows quickly from offense to defense. Players call their own fouls and violations, so there is a real culture of respect and fair play. But the most fun part is the people — it is a great community.

As the president of the Bentley Ultimate Society and the coach of the team for my third and fourth year, I learned valuable leadership lessons. My last year we took the team to Nationals for the first time in school history and took third place. Some of my best friends to this day are from the Ultimate team at Bentley.

Tell us your story of becoming a successful entrepreneur.

It is a story about opportunity and being prepared. I identified a strong growth industry and was in the right place at the right time. I had also built the skills needed to be able to seize the opportunity and continue developing it.

I had been in the biotech industry for five years by then. I knew the customer base. I had been getting ready to launch a business for years, since starting at Bentley. I connected with a scientist working on a leading antibody discovery technology, and after becoming versed in the science, helped launch the business around that innovation. In short, we wanted to make antibodies faster — to produce new drugs and save lives faster.

To finance the idea, we bootstrapped it, which is a very different path than a lot of people take, especially in biotech. We relied on just one round of funding from family and friends. We grew it slowly at first. I had another full-time job for the first two-and-a-half years so as not to have to pay myself a salary. Then we had a remarkable growth streak, especially during the pandemic. When most of the world shut down, we stayed open. We worked on 12 different vaccine programs to help get those ready for clinic. We had an exceptional couple of years of growth. It was the right time to sell. It was eight years from startup to sale.

What was it like to start and sell a business so early on?

Intense. Being a business owner and being an entrepreneur can take over your life. I have worked with many CEOs who feel similar. It can become a major portion of an entrepreneur’s identity. After the sale, I felt the loss of say over the business and a major piece of my identity fell away. It took a long time to decompress, to get over the long hours, to establish a new equilibrium. But I would not trade it. Now I have time with my family. I am a father. I am a fisherman. I am a farmer. I am writing a book. I own my own consulting business, and help CEOs and businesses succeed. I love sharing my experiences with students. Just by telling my story and shining a light on some of the hard parts, it expands what people think of as possible, which expands what actually is possible. 

Advice to aspiring entrepreneurs.

Practically speaking, I think it is important to build businesses that are sellable. A sellable business is an ideal business to own and run — even if it is a family business with someone else stepping in to lead it or even if you decide to stay long term. A business should be something you can build and operate well regardless of who is at the fore or who runs it next.

More philosophically, I say, Dream big. People always told me I was dreaming too much, too big. But every year I learned I should be dreaming even bigger.