Why Brown / Why History
Brown was an obvious choice. I'd considered film school, but decided I wanted a broader education — I figured I could always learn the technical side of filmmaking on my own. What I couldn't teach myself was how to think across disciplines, and Brown's open curriculum gave me room to do that. I started as a Modern Culture & Media major but found I cared less about the theory of media and more about its actual impact on the world. So I landed in History, where I could pursue the questions that genuinely fascinated me.
I had two threads within my concentration. The first explored how the emergence of new media — photography, film, radio — fundamentally changed the way history was recorded, edited, and understood. The second traced how energy regime transformations — from fire to farming, steam engines to fossil fuels, and now solar and nuclear — have driven step-function increases in humanity's ability to do work.
NOLS & Alaska
After my first year at Brown, I spent 40 days in the Brooks Range — the Noatak Wilderness and Gates of the Arctic National Park, in the northern reaches of Alaska. I went out there with seven other students and two instructors. No cell phone, no hot water, no wallet, no amenities. A thousand miles from the nearest road. I'd never camped before. I'd barely spent a single night in a tent.
The first ten days are about learning to survive. Then you move past surviving into thriving. Being completely disconnected from technology for that long changed how I thought about it. We spend so much of our lives organizing our days around our devices, but at the end of the day, technology is supposed to be a tool — something that helps us achieve things, not something we serve. In the backcountry, what you need is clear: shelter, food, water, safety. Everything else is a want. That reframing — want first, then need — is something I've tried to carry with me ever since.
The first version of Pangea
Those two intellectual threads converged into a question I couldn't let go of: if better energy systems produce better hardware, and better hardware produces better software, and that cycle keeps accelerating — what happens to work? Technology creates enormous value, but that value doesn't distribute itself equally. There would likely be significant displacement in the types of jobs people do, and that gap would need something to bridge it.
I started exploring the role marketplaces could play. That line of thinking is what led me to build the earliest version of Pangea: a fractional hiring platform designed to connect people with flexible, high-quality work.
Key lessons
Brown gave me three things I didn't know I needed. An intellectual framework for thinking about how technology, media, and energy shape society. A wilderness experience that rewired how I think about leadership, survival, and what actually matters. And the earliest version of an idea — Pangea — that I'd spend the next decade building. I arrived as a kid who liked making videos. I left as someone with a point of view about where the world was heading and a conviction that I could build something to meet it.