Global Impact Starts with Global Connection

One of the goals behind Techquity is to share the expertise of our partners, largely cultivated in the US, with investors and companies across the globe. Although I recognize that not everyone agrees with me on this, I feel it is far too easy to bask in the security, prosperity, and technological progress we’ve made in the US and imagine that things are similar in other parts of the world.

But they aren’t. 

Without taking a political position and despite our challenges, it’s obvious that not everyone enjoys the same opportunities, liberties, and privileges as we do in America.  

It is clear that technology, along with capitalism’s ability to create economic value with broad impact, are two of the levers that have the potential to lead us to a more prosperous world. At Techquity, these are the levers which we are uniquely positioned to help move.  

In 2026 and beyond, Techquity will continue to  work to contribute to the growth of technology capabilities not just in the US, but also to expand our global impact.

While my partners at Techquity support this mission, and many have their own personal connections to it, I would like to share why this vision is so personally important to me. 

Forging Global Connections

I’ve always believed that global impact starts with global connection. That idea has been a personal driver of mine for as long as I can remember. In my late teens and early twenties, I created a personal mandate:

I needed to spend at least one month a year outside the United States. I felt strongly that if I wanted to understand the world, I couldn’t just read about it or drop in for a few days. I had to actually be in it.

That mandate ended up shaping a lot more than just a month per year, though. At 19, I left the country and didn’t come back for two years. I attended Georg August Universitat in Gottingen, Germany for a year and travelled around Europe as a student.

Then I spent months travelling from London to Nepal overland in the back of a truck, on what is now memorialized  as “The Hippie Trail”. I then went onward across Southeast Asia by bus, boat and an occasional plane, and ultimately to Japan, before returning to the US.  In a time before satellite TV, cellphones and the Internet, I was completely disconnected in a way which is almost impossible to imagine today. I spoke to my parents once in those two years from age 19 to 21. That phone call took two days to set up and required me to be at a German post office which had long distance phone booths. 

This experience was a complete separation from the California context of my birth, and it completely changed how I saw people, culture, politics, work, everything. I realized that the lottery  of birth is one of the fundamental influences on how you see and experience the world, the opportunities you have and challenges you face, and fundamentally how you live your life.  It takes intent and effort to expand those parameters, and for many people, to overcome their circumstances.

When you step outside of that lottery for long enough, you realize that every corner of the earth has something to give and to receive. Today, I see that one of the areas in which the US is most readily poised to give is in the technology and business sectors. But as a young man in those days, I simply recognized that I had the ability, the good fortune, and the desire to live in multiple worlds.

I didn’t want to be a part-time tourist. I didn’t want to pass through a place and only see it from the outside. I wanted to engage and build things in other countries. I wanted to work and live and raise my kids in places that wouldn’t have been the default.

Most people can't do that. For a lot of people, it's hard to spend real time abroad, let alone build a life in a foreign country (or multiple). But I've been lucky, and also intentional, about putting myself in situations where I could do this. I have now lived and worked in places like Mexico, South Africa, Germany, France, the UK, Norway, and others. I have felt what it is like to not just move through these places, but to stop in them and be part of something.

A Winding Road

It has not been a straight shot from the Hippie Trail to leading technology development in different markets, but it all stems from the intuition I had as a kid. I knew I needed to work in other cultures to really understand them.

It wasn’t enough to visit or observe; I wanted to operate. To live. 

That desire led me to school in Germany and then to pursue roles that had international footprints. It led me to take my family to France while working for Apple and to chair a company that went public on the Norwegian stock exchange. We were company 186, and I got to ring the bell when the IPO finalized. I was living the impact in another country that I had always dreamed of. 

But it wasn’t all idyllic. Before all that professional experience, I experienced some rough places.  At 20, I drove across eastern Turkey, Iran (before the Shah fell), Afghanistan (before the Russian invasion and endless wars), and through the Khyber pass and Kashmir.

Later, I traveled through Latin America. It was a chaotic time to be there. We went through Nicaragua during the Sandinista revolution, where we’d get stopped at a police checkpoint and then just a few miles later, we’d get stopped at a rebel checkpoint. Then we flew over the Darién Gap to San Andrés Island, then to Cartagena, then to Bogotá. From there, we took buses down through Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. Argentina and Chile were both harsh dictatorships. I was 23 years old. 

It was a crazy time to be living in these places, but it was exactly the kind of context that teaches you what freedom really is, what safety really means, and what people live through all throughout the world. It makes you appreciate the stuff that most Americans take for granted, like relative safety and prosperity.

From these experiences, I developed an interest in professional roles with multicultural reach. This is what brought me to the work I described above, and similar roles at Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, RDIO, and other companies. Working internationally taught me to respect the nuance in how different people see the world, how they communicate, how they make decisions, and how they build trust.  I developed an awareness that my views, experience and perspective were merely one truth, not the truth. 

These experiences also made me want this same exposure for my family. That’s why we raised our children part-time in France and South Africa. I wanted them to see that there are places where the natural wonder looks like lions, not redwoods, and to see that not everyone lives a life that looks like theirs. For better and for worse. I wanted them to experience something different as a visceral piece of their development, not as an intellectual concept or a quick visit. 

I wanted that for them, and I continued wanting it for myself. 

Now—Personally and for Techquity

To this day, I continue wanting these experiences for myself, and that continues to shape how I live and lead. It’s why I split my time between Seattle, Mexico, and South Africa. It's why I want to continue working to have a positive global impact. It’s why Techquity is expanding our work beyond the US, to other investors, companies, and countries where we can add value. 

This expansion marks a new professional chapter based on the realization I had decades ago: Every corner of the world has something to give and something to receive. As Techquity seeks to drive impact in places that can benefit from some of the world’s greatest minds in tech, we also seek to make real connections with the places we work. 

We seek to show up in ways that are not merely transactional, but instead represent our view that freedom, progress, and prosperity are ours to share, and that technology is the way we get there.  

Listen to "Zero to Prove"