My Story

I grew up in Rockford, Illinois, a small city in the Midwest, and the setting of about as All-American a childhood as you can script. My world was the neighborhood, and the neighborhood was a pack of kids. Our signature event was infection tag: fifty of us, no boundaries, rounds that lasted hours and sprawled across the entire subdivision. When we weren't running, we were biking to the mall, to the river, to each other's houses, and across highways we had no business crossing, at noon and, occasionally, at three in the morning.

We built forts in the woods and creeks, and we played every sport that involved a ball, along with several that didn't. Summers were swimming and ice cream; winters were snowball fights and hot chocolate. It was a childhood made of motion, seasons, and other people, and I was in love with sports, the outdoors, and everyone around me, in roughly that order, depending on the day.

My dad, Peter J. Kruchten, was my biggest role model. He was an entrepreneur in the truest sense: endlessly positive, charismatic enough to make friends with literally everyone, and willing to try his hand at just about anything. My favorite memory of him is our annual ski trip, where we'd shred the mountain all day, I'd get spoiled to a steak dinner at night, and we'd sit there talking about all the cool things life can and could be.

When I was 13, he passed away suddenly from leukemia.

Losing him was incredibly difficult, but it's also the thing that shaped me most. It taught me how precious life is, and shortly after his passing and celebration of life, something core to who I was and would become settled into place. I was still the same fun-loving kid, but now with a depth of purpose I couldn't have manufactured any other way: make the absolute most of every opportunity, and waste nothing. I've been chasing my wildest dreams ever since, for both of us. And those ski trip conversations about all the cool things life could be? I consider them open items on a long list of dreams I have to check off.

High school is where that purpose first had somewhere to go: three varsity sports, a perfect GPA across 17 AP classes, and three part-time jobs (server, cart pusher, busboy) stacking capital for whatever came next. The intensity showed up most on the track, where I spent 20 to 30 hours a week on long distance, sprints, weights, and plyometrics, all in the name of shaving seconds off my 800 meter personal best and chasing a regional title. I never got first. I got 2:03, third in the region, and a lesson worth more than the title: you don't always catch the thing you're chasing, but you become someone different in the pursuit. Written down, those years sound like a grind, but that's not how I remember them. I remember the friendships and the memories, which I carry to this day. Intensity and joy aren't opposites; in fact, in many ways I've found they go hand in hand.

Then came the leap, though honestly, it started with a school trip. My favorite teacher, David Stockton, led a group of us through Greece and Italy, and somewhere between the ruins and the coastline it hit me how enormous the world actually was, and that I had to see it. Around the same time, my best friend Aidan Tack, two years older and living in the heart of Chicago, was giving me a running education in what it feels like to move through a big, fast city. I fell in love with that feeling. So when I found the World Bachelor in Business, three degrees across three universities on three continents, the decision made itself. I left Rockford on my own dollar, committed to self funding my education. People ask if it was scary. It genuinely wasn't. It felt like spreading my wings and finally flying. I was just so excited.

Within 24 hours of landing, Los Angeles felt like home. For the first time, I was surrounded by people with big dreams and an even bigger love for life, a combination I hadn't known I was starving for. It's also where I met Loki Cheema, who became one of my closest friends and, not long after, founded Hemut, the YC company I'd later join. LA gave me something else, too: the itch to fix things that seemed broken. USC was one of the most diverse universities anywhere, yet people still stayed in their cliques, and that seemed like a shame. So I founded Nexus, a club built specifically to help people meet people completely unlike themselves, which at its peak had fifty members across three chapters at three universities.

Hong Kong was the hardest, but also the most rewarding year of my life. The shock of a new culture, a new school system, and an ocean between me and everyone I knew initially left me feeling lost, stripped of my identity in a way I had never experienced. But slowly, I embedded: I made local friends (shout-out James, Jeremy, Carlos, Russell, and Ian), embraced the culture, and grew to genuinely love the city. Hong Kong feels like home now, and I'm permanently looking for an excuse to move back. Asia also turned travel from a hobby into a lifestyle, taking me through Bangkok, Tokyo, Bali, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Harbin, and Seoul, with more than a hundred flights since 2025, and counting.

Somewhere in there, Hemut stopped being a friend's company and became mine too. I came on as the third full-time employee, which felt like learning to fly a plane that was already in the air: some hours incredibly challenging, some incredibly rewarding, and plenty that were both at once. The work took me wherever it needed to, including a stretch living in Arkansas doing sales (thanks, Jaycee!), and packed an ultra accelerated education in software, sales, go-to-market, and AI into a single year. The professional details live in Work. The human ones are simpler: to this day, I'm grateful to Cheema for betting on me to help lead his company. That bet changed my trajectory.

Then came San Francisco and a summer at Bain & Company, staffed on cases across the firm's AI transformation and retail practices. I helped run a full digital and AI transformation of a Fortune 200 technology company's go-to-market motion, and built bespoke AI tools that analyzed 1.8 million customer reviews for a Fortune 200 retailer. As ever, the professional details live in Work.