I grew up in Leawood, Kansas with an entrepreneurial streak early. At 15, I was running a small business and testing ads to find customers. Even then, I understood that data-informed decisions beat gut instinct. That instinct has driven everything since.

After college I joined Gallup, where I learned how analytics make organizations more productive and customers more loyal. The more interesting lesson came not from the analytics work but from watching Gallup itself: seeing a legendary brand get disrupted by cheaper technology upstarts. Gallup had the data advantage. They just moved too slowly. I knew I wanted to be on the other side of that equation. Inside the companies doing the disrupting.

Tuck led me to Rakuten in Tokyo and San Francisco. I saw firsthand how a dominant ecommerce platform loses ground when a competitor owns a different layer of the stack. Amazon owned distribution. Rakuten owned the marketplace. When distribution became the moat, advertising became Rakuten's path forward. That was my introduction to how first-party data becomes the strategic lever for platforms competing at scale.

That insight led me directly to Walmart Connect. I joined in 2019 and spent six years building the products that defined how Walmart competes in advertising. First PM on the Walmart DSP. Launched TikTok, Meta, and Pinterest integrations. Built the clean room infrastructure enabling privacy-safe data collaboration with major external partners. Most recently, building agentic AI workflows that automate what used to take human hours.

The through-line: platforms win when they own the data layer and build the right partnerships around it. That is what I have spent my career doing, and where I am headed next.