I was born in Nairobi, Kenya, and grew up between Eldoret and Mombasa — the highlands and the coast. From 2007 to 2014 I worked as a defense contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan with KBR and Dyncorp. Between rotations and on the long evenings inside forward operating bases, I taught myself to build — shipping a handful of small Kenya-facing internet businesses (Simbabiz, DVPlaza, Autogy) from a laptop and an unreliable connection. I learned, before I had the language for it, what most of the work would always be: figuring out how to ship, alone, with whatever you've got.
I came home and joined Vestas America in Portland — a Fortune 500 wind energy operator. While there, in May 2017, I founded Action Healthcare Staffing LLC. I left Vestas later that year to focus on it full-time. In 2019 I founded Actriv Inc. as a more tech-forward staffing platform, and on January 1, 2021, I merged the two — combining Action's operating scale with Actriv's technology orientation under the Actriv Healthcare name. Four consecutive years on the Inc. 5000 followed — peaking at #40 nationally in 2021 — and a decade later, that operating ground became the lab where ShiftNex's core IP was developed.
I live in Lake Tapps, WA. Father of two. The thread across all of it: why does the way we work, the way we hire, the way we coordinate human time, look so much worse than it should? The thesis I'm building toward, across both Actriv and ShiftNex: operators with deep domain knowledge, equipped with AI, can rebuild entire industries from the inside out — and the regulated industries, the boring industries, the ones nobody writes about, are where it matters most.
Read the ShiftNex founding story →
