My job titles never told the story. It was learning how systems work and how organizations behave.
My path has run wide. Help desk and QA, then consulting, audit, data, cybersecurity, risk, M&A, and eventually executive leadership as COO and CPO. Different jobs, different companies, but the same basic instinct underneath all of them: understand the system, find what matters, and make it work better.
Since stepping off the corporate track in 2022, the chapter has been self-driven and AI-native. Built with AI. Made of AI. Persek OS, Vitality Quest, homeschool, farm. Learn by doing, again. I have learned more in the last two years than in any stretch of my life.
I started at the edge of the machine. Student worker on a help desk, fixing other people’s computers before I knew what I wanted to build. Then QA, development, the unglamorous work of keeping things working. Deloitte turned that into a more formal apprenticeship in data, audit, delivery, and how institutions actually operate.
That stretch mattered because it gave me range early. I was not learning one narrow discipline. I was learning how technical work, client work, and operational work fit together.
I joined Visa in 2009 as a technology auditor and spent the next twelve years moving through audit, cybersecurity, risk, and M&A, ending in product. The titles changed; the work was mostly the same. Someone would hand me something newly acquired, broken, or not yet understood, and the job was to figure out what it actually was.
The biggest version of that was the Visa Europe integration in 2015: an €18.25B deal with global risk oversight across all of it. One of six acquisitions at Visa, and by far the largest and most complex. It was systems work at full scale.
In 2018 Visa moved me to Auckland to help run Fraedom as COO and CPO. I had assisted with the M&A due diligence and integration. After the deal closed they asked me to stay on as an operator.
Fraedom had about 450 people across seven cities and supported some of the largest banks in North America, Australia, and New Zealand. New Zealand was not the obvious next move from San Francisco payments. That was part of why I took it.
Our youngest was born in New Zealand in 2020, right as Covid hit and the country went into lockdown. I was not a New Zealand citizen, so leaving the country meant risking not being allowed back in. Family in the States could not come visit us for the same reason in reverse.
By 2021 that calculus had stopped working. Family above everything else, every time. We decided to leave New Zealand and come back to the States.
I was going to leave Visa at the same time. That is when the company asked me to stay one more year to help build out the B2B product solutions organization in San Francisco under a new leader. I did. In March 2022 I stepped away from the corporate track entirely.
My family had already moved to a farm in North Carolina. I started figuring out what came next. I ended up going down the AI rabbit hole. Everything I have built since comes out of that.
Across twenty years of jobs, I have worked within, led, collaborated with, or audited every single function inside a company. Depth in some of them. Breadth across all of them. And a sense of how they actually fit together.
Operations, product, M&A, risk, engineering, cybersecurity, audit, and data are the ones I worked inside. Strategy, marketing, sales, legal, compliance, HR, finance, and customer support are the ones I collaborated with across the years.
And as an auditor, first at Deloitte and then in internal audit at Visa, I audited nearly every function represented here. Audit is less a dot on the ring than the lens I learned to look at every other dot through.
Taken together, it is a cross-section of how an entire company actually runs. Not a specialist in any one function. A generalist across all of them.
And now I am back to building, on top of all of it. AI-native, self-directed, every day. The motto on the first dot of the arc, learn by doing, turns out to be the motto on the last dot too.