Insights on Building Mission-Driven Organizations
Practical lessons from 15+ years of leadership across nonprofits, real estate, and healthtech. Topics include AI implementation, nonprofit operations, business systems, and what it takes to scale organizations without losing your mission.
Collapsing the Skill Stack: How AI Turned a 10-Person Team Into One Operator
For most of the last 30 years, building anything meaningful required stitching together specialists. You needed a writer, a designer, a developer, a marketer, an ops person, a data analyst, a customer support lead, and usually a project manager to hold it all together. The work was not actually that complicated, but the coordination was. The bottleneck was never intelligence. It was friction.
AI removed that friction.
2011: The Year We Almost Didn't Make It
By the end of 2011, Stupid Cancer had $13,000 in the bank.
That number still sits heavy when I say it out loud.
It wasn't just a low balance. It was the weight of a year that had gone completely sideways. Behind the scenes, people were updating resumes. Conversations got careful. Nobody was optimistic about what came next or if there would even be a next.
Grabbing Life by the Balls: A Conversation on Cancer, Work, and Building Things That Last
I recently joined Mallet & Michelle for a conversation that ended up covering a lot more than testicular cancer, even though that is where my story usually starts. What made this one different was how naturally it moved between personal history, work, leadership, and the experiences that quietly shape how we show up in the world.
My connection to testicular cancer is personal. When I was a high school senior, my dad was diagnosed. There was no long lead-up or time to process it emotionally. He found a lump, saw a doctor, and within days was in surgery. That summer, which was supposed to be about graduation and getting ready for college, turned into chemo appointments and hospital visits. Like a lot of families who go through cancer, we figured things out as we went. You do what needs to be done and worry about the rest later.
How AI Can Strengthen Nonprofit Operations Without Replacing Human Relationship Work
When I first started at Stupid Cancer, I took the CEO’s Outlook contacts from years of his personal advocacy work and manually entered every single one into SugarCRM. Line by line. Name, email, organization, phone number. Copy, paste, save. It took hours. And none of it felt connected to the mission. It was my first real glimpse into something every nonprofit eventually discovers. The work you care about is always competing with the work you can’t avoid.
For years, that kind of administrative drag was just part of the job. You powered through it. You made peace with the backlog. You assumed the operational chaos was permanent. The calls you didn’t return. The follow ups you meant to send. The donor updates that slipped because your CRM was a mess. It was constant.
