Welcome
stay as long as you like
Welcome
stay as long as you like
My Journey
Where it began
My adventure in business all started in college after a surprise week long hospital stay for my wife left us penniless and deep in debt. I dropped out of school and sold my house to fund our first company, Evolve Security. In 2013 I had the opportunity to pivot to residential solar as a reseller for Solar City. Evolve Solar became the fastest growing solar company in the country.
SunEdison
Because of Evolve's success and low cost of acquisition per install, SunEdison purchased Evolve in 2015, just days after my 30th birthday and just days before they announced their intentions to purchase Vivint Solar. That put SunEdison under the microscope by investors who soon uncovered terminal flaws in SUNE's business model eventually leading to their closure and bankruptcy.
Rekon - an interlude
For a brief period during the downfall of SUNE, I partnered with some friends to launch the first gamified mobile app for the firearms industry. With an experience akin to Strava, shooters could record their target practice data and our app would provide a score for that session. We envisioned a future in which our tech allowed shooting ranges to evolve to become more like Top Golf. However, when SunEdison filed bankruptcy, my non-compete in solar was voided and I felt the call to return to residential solar.
Rising from the ashes
After a gathering of our key players from Evolve, we decided to launch a new solar company based on the principles and learnings we experienced at Evolve but with a greater focus on vertically integrated software solutions to control the customer experience from soup to nuts. The first product that we built was called Phoenix and was quickly identified as a platform that should be sold to solar companies as a stand alone SaaS offering. Encōr operated from 2016 to 2024 and installed hundreds of millions of dollars of projects and employed thousands of individuals across the country.
Spinning out Solo
With the early success of the Phoenix platform within Encōr, we quickly realized that rather than operating as a division within an EPC, the platform would get more adoption as a stand alone entity. In 2018, Solo, LLC was spun up and walled off from Encōr and with a new leadership team being hired to run Encōr, I stepped over to run Solo full time. Solo is now the premier residential solar proposal tool with 40% of all residential quotes originating in our software annually.
Ki Financial Services
With the majority of all solar loans in the country being originated through integrations with Solo, consumer finance was a logical next endeavor. With a bank sponsorship with Hatch Bank we launched KiFi in 2022 and originated $50MM in consumer loan products in a very short period of time. However, when the regional banking crisis hit in 2023, it was decided to stop lending operations and focus on TPO.
Soldier Mountain - the passion project
When the pandemic hit and we were all forced to work from home, I began shopping for a ski-in/ski-out cabin for my family. Soon I came across a small rural ski resort for sale in Fairfield, ID. After a short due diligence process and after bringing on a few select partners, we finalized the purchase. Days later, a lightning strike ignited a forest fire many miles away that burned into the ski area boundaries. After a miraculous effort, we were able to open the mountain under our management for the 2020-21 ski season.
Pay with Parlay
While building all of these businesses from the ground up, I was often faced with problems to which enterprise software provided the best solution. Without the cashflow to acquire an enterprise software with large annual payments due upfront, we often opted for less effective SMB solutions. We built Parlay as a Buy-Now-Pay-Later for small businesses seeking enterprise SaaS products. The SaaS provider gets the annual payment upfront and the SMB makes payments monthly that fit their cashflow.