I don't really have a linear career path. I've been generally in the Food and Agtech world here in Silicon Valley for the past decade. I fell backward into where I am today. Fresh out of college I actually pursued the policy track. I spent the first couple of years out of college in Washington DC doing various kinds of policy work on Capitol Hill and a couple of think tanks. Then came back here to San Francisco to work for a nonprofit after spending some time in Washington DC. At that time I was roommates with a guy who was a startup founder. The whole startup venture world at that time was totally new to me. I didn't know about it but I would interact with my roommate quite a bit and kind of fell in love with that whole scene. It was creative, It was technical and it was scrapping. There was a lot of inertia behind what I thought I wanted to do, which was still the policy world during that time. I went back to graduate school, back in Washington DC in international relations and economics. That was a good experience from the perspective of figuring out what you don't want to do. The second timer from DC I figured out pretty quickly that the policy world doesn't really fit very well for me. Concurrent to my graduate studies, I started working part-time with a large Japanese trading firm. Their office was in Washington, the head of that office at the time was a really great guy. He became a mentor and he knew that my heart was not in the work that they were doing in Washington. So he said, why don't we set you up in our Silicon Valley office? so I transitioned from there. I graduated from grad school to a position in the same firm here in Silicon Valley and that firm it's Mitsubishi Corporation, the largest trading firm in Japan. They have holdings operations across basically every vertical you can think of my policy background. I was very attracted to big impact legacy industries where there was a lot of room for innovation, disruption, and you could have a maximum impact on society. I naturally gravitated to the business group within that firm that handled all of the well vertically integrated. Everything from production agriculture down to retail that whole value change and through that started networking heavily the venture ecosystem. I met some folks who eventually became colleagues, co-founders of mine first helped to find an organization called the Mixing bowl. If folks are familiar with startup grind basically a platform to connect innovators in food and ag-tech.

At Coke we have a few big bucket strategic interest areas in the organization and within each big bucket area, what we're trying to do is source external innovations to solve those challenge areas. I spent a lot of time running around with venture capitalists and start-ups in the area within those categories trying to find solutions. Then on the Coke side connecting those into our business units and other teams with the PMO's to actually bring those things to market. It's a lot of tech scouting, soursing and then building the business logic around primarily the structure of pilots and proofs of concept experiments and co-development agreements. I spent the greater part of last year building little accelerator for the company I run that now as well. Weekly hours vary greatly and I actually worked remotely. Coca Cola is headquartered in Atlanta. I'm based here in Silicon Valley. The rest of my team is in Atlanta having said that we're a global team. So I also have colleagues that I worked with across Europe and Singapore, Shanghai, Mexico, Australia and Japan. Most of my travel is based on that.

Our evaluation is based on who is catching the ball, so the personalities and politics of different business units and different geography is within the organization is often very different. But it's actually what my team is mainly responsible for is kind of checking the box on technical validation. Um, so we need to make sure that all the companies that I interact with are something that is not going to be dangerous or the science is legit. Um, you know, the claims that companies make are valid. That's why we structure these pilots. A lot of the information and data that I deal with initially comes from my personal network. So based on the strength of the investor's replication of the investors, companies that are in their portfolio. I work with a few VC's very closely and really value their input. Beyond that top of the other stuff we use the insides crunch base. It's really a human-driven process.