I was an operator before I was a lender.

Public finance

My first job was at Development Planning and Financing Group, a municipal finance consultancy in Southern California. We formed the Mello-Roos districts that paid for infrastructure after Proposition 13 capped property tax. I was promoted three times in three years, wrote the fiscal impact analyses and facility financing plans, and helped entitle almost 40,000 lots.

The year away

In 2017 I stopped working and travelled for a year, on foot through seventeen countries. Everything after that year is a different kind of work.

Land and retail

In 2018 I founded Alexander Land Development Consulting: 330 residential lots entitled and financed across eight distressed land assets. At H-E-B I owned the strategy for the front end, across product lines totaling over $1 billion in annual sales, while studying at USC. One of my placements was a cryptocurrency company, which hired me away.

Turnarounds

At CoinCloud I took over finance two weeks in, after half the staff was laid off. We pulled machines from thousands of unprofitable locations and the company became profitable as Bitcoin fell; a lawsuit with the manufacturer still took it into bankruptcy. At Skillz, a public company, the finance function was two of us after a twelve-person team was let go. Then a distressed education-technology portfolio, moved onto an ERP and retargeted.

Underwriting

I finished an MBA at the USC Marshall School of Business in 2022 and became lead underwriter at Key Business Strategies. Hundreds of files later, the same business kept getting turned down: real collateral, a real operator, and a file that wouldn’t fit the box.

On my own

I am honest and direct, which does not always fit inside a corporate structure. So I built the lender that would take that file. The terms are on BuildUp Capital.