Here's a belief I hold close to the center of who I am: almost nothing that matters gets done alone. Product management taught me this with a vengeance, but I felt it long before I had the vocabulary for it. You succeed by building social capital and by aligning real people around a shared goal and a clear sense of direction. The technical chops matter, but they're not the bottleneck. People are.
I've always been pulled toward connecting people — in my friend groups, in my work, in life generally. I seem to have an innate knack for designing experiences that actually mean something to the people in them. I'll plan a trip that's tightly enough structured that we can do something genuinely risky, like a via ferrata or rappelling a slot canyon, and still have everyone come home safe and proud. Or I'll just try to build a little community wherever I happen to be, because I care about community in a way that runs deep.
Through my undergrad years I bounced between four different church congregations, and in every one of them I got tasked to co-chair the activities committee — plan the events, run them, make them meaningful. That kept happening because it's a thing I'm genuinely drawn to and genuinely good at, and people sense it.
When I total it up, the numbers get a little staggering to me. Hundreds of people, across hundreds of trips and outings and gatherings. Friendships I watched start on those trips. Relationships, marriages, kids who trace back, in some small way, to people simply being in the same place at the same time because I set it up. That brings me a kind of satisfaction I struggle to put into words.
The professional version is the same muscle. A peer-mentorship program for MBA students. A health-accountability group I run on the side. Book clubs I've started and sustained. As Get Seeded chair, my entire job is engineering a room where student founders feel safe enough to pitch and energized enough to come back.
And it really does work like product design. Lower the friction to getting started. Make the value obvious. Pace the experience so the slow person isn't left behind and the fast one doesn't run wild. When it's done right, it feels effortless from the inside, like it organized itself. Designing that illusion is the actual skill.
So connector, to me, isn't a personality label. It's a core tenet — true in my work, true in my personal life, and true at the level of what I think a good life is even for.