My Story

I was born in Rapid City, SD and raised with a relentless curiosity about how things work. From an early age, I was drawn to building, analyzing, and creating, whether that meant constructing catapults out of LEGO or later testing the limits of physical and mental skill. My Native American heritage has deeply shaped my discipline and resilience. Participating in sweat lodges and the Sundancing ceremony, which lasts four days with minimal food or water under the harsh sun, rain, and hail of the Badlands, taught me endurance and perseverance. I vividly remember my first Sundance, when a hailstorm destroyed one of the Teepees on the third day. Shivering, wet, and exhausted, I continued, and that experience left a lasting impression on my approach to challenges.

I joined the military before graduating high school, spending nearly a year away from home in training just after turning eighteen. With my family unable to fund my college education, I found my own path to earn a degree. My fascination with systems, patterns, statistics, and prediction, and how events follow cycles, drove me to pursue engineering at South Dakota School of Mines & Technology. My love of understanding systems eventually led me to finance, where I founded Scoria Capital LLC to apply the same analytical precision to investing. I believe that wealth, whether monetary, emotional, spiritual, or intellectual, comes from progress: the evolution of systems toward higher efficiency and effectiveness. I reject rigid, outdated methods and embrace agile, lean approaches cultivated through experience, wisdom, and calculated risk.

Every step of my journey, from the Badlands to the factory floor, the cockpit, and the boardroom, has been shaped by curiosity, discipline, and a drive to master the systems I engage with. These principles continue to guide my work, my pursuits, and the impact I strive to leave in every domain I touch.