Early in my time here, I sat in on a meeting with one of our LTCI partners. The whole conversation was about trust. The partner wanted to spend $1,500 per member on grab bars, shower safety equipment, and general home modifications, and they wanted us to spend it fast. The problem was that the members didn’t believe us. A free home safety visit with no bill and no sales pitch sounded like a scam. So we sat there debating things like whether co-branded materials would help, whether the partner or the provider should make the first call, and how to convince someone that we genuinely just wanted to make their home safer. That was the moment the flywheel clicked for me. The insurer saves money by keeping someone out of a nursing home. The provider gets paid. We get paid. And the elder stays safe and happy in their own home. Everyone in that room was trying to do the right thing, and the business worked because of that, not in spite of it.

This mission is why I’m in elder care at all. I watched my mother struggle to care for her parents and keep hitting walls that would have been easy to knock down from the other side, with the right technology and the right team. I knew I could build those things, and I felt compelled to. “Fulfilling support for independence at home” is exactly the thing my family needed and couldn’t find.

I lived three hours away while my mother cared for her parents, so I couldn’t be there every day, but I traveled in often and did whatever was needed when I was there. Sometimes that was a food run. Sometimes it was moving my grandparents with the lift. My mom hit every wall there is: finding providers, scheduling them, dealing with insurance, paperwork, home modifications, and keeping her brothers in the loop. There wasn’t one big dramatic moment — it was a slow drain. The whiteboard and calendar in the kitchen were constantly out of sync with the text thread, the emails to providers, the caregiver who actually showed up, and what the agency thought the schedule was. Dealing with agency caregivers versus private ones added another layer. That gap, the one between what a family needs and what exists, is what I think about when I build things here.

In high school I seriously weighed clown college against engineering. It was a genuinely hard call. I’d spent years learning to juggle, walk on stilts, and do magic tricks. Engineering won, but the buffoonery never left. I’m also a big game person. When I’m in town we host game nights with board games and cards. And when COVID started easing up, my wife and I rented out our house for a year and took our two kids and the dog on the road in the van, bouncing between hotels, Airbnbs, and the couches of friends and family.