I’m Andy, a software engineer turned financial planner. I’ve long been interested in economics, finance, entrepreneurship, and technology. As a child, I witnessed the power of entrepreneurship and technology growing up in Silicon Valley, and I was fascinated by the dot-com boom and the explosion of 3-D graphics processing. My first investment was a Hank Aaron autographed baseball at the age of 7, but my grandfather got me interested in stocks when I was in middle school, and I’ve been hooked ever since.

From 2011-2020 I worked at a small startup in the SF Bay building backend telco infra that powers Verizon Visible and deployments for companies such as Telstra, Vodafone, Swisscom, AT&T, Orange, 3, and Ooredoo, among others. Touched almost everything on the product and kinda became the go-to guy for emergency production issues. This both filled my desire to be useful and led to me burning out hard.

I love technology and learning, but I derive my greatest satisfaction from helping people, which is what I missed most in tech. My own experience with burnout and not living the life I truly desired led me to plan my own time away from work, and I now work as a financial planner with the goal of helping others pursue what they are passionate about and enabling them to live their best lives.

I have a wide range of interests and love to nerd out on a wide variety of topics from the obscurest corners of ancient history to the modern cutting-edge scientific breakthroughs happening every day. I am a huge fan of South Park and had created a searchable South Park episode database site and an associated Chrome extension before getting hit with DMCA takedown requests from Viacom. I’m also probably the only financial advisor that uses vim and emacs daily.

I also part-time van-life around the USA, mostly west of the Rockies.