On the surface, doing deals and buying and selling businesses might appear to be driven by money or ego. But there's a much bigger why that motivates me.
The bigger why
We all want to feel safe. We all want someone in our corner. We all want to know we're doing the right thing, and to be loved and cared for. So many young men today don't feel that way. And if we look beyond my immediate tribe, this is an emerging trend among many people of all backgrounds, races and cultures.
And the pace of technology and the exponential expansion of the screen time and information we consume and must process every day only compounds this experience. We are more connected than ever before; yet many feel more alone and isolated than ever before.
For thousands of years we lived in small tribal communities. We were surrounded by our brothers and sisters, fathers and grandfathers, adults and elders. And we had strong, interdependent community bonds that lasted a lifetime.
We don't live like that today. We've invented cities, modern transportation networks, and created massive growth and innovation built upon individual success and specialized expertise. But that comes at a price.
Modern life gave us something beautiful: freedom, individual rights, the pursuit of our own happiness, and the freedom to live, work and thrive anywhere on the planet. We are free from the need of a deeply connected local community. But we traded away our interdependence and connection for some of our modern conveniences, achievements and lifestyle.
We are more connected than we have ever been, and many are finding themselves lonelier than ever.
So we must now make a concerted, intentional effort to mentor, connect, and be in community with each other. It's in our nature to be connected. We need hugs, laughs and deep discussions. We thrive on authentic human connection.
We don't all need to agree and like each other, but we must love each other. That belief is underneath everything I do, including mergers, partnerships and dealmaking.
Oppression to celebration
This is the philosophy that guides my life's work. It was born from my own lived experience, and I hope it's a roadmap for anyone who has ever felt less than.
There's a ladder we climb, as individuals, as a community, and as a culture:
Most of the progressives in the world are working toward equality. But I think equality as the goal is a half measure. It's a necessary step, and we absolutely have to get there, but a world that's merely equal is a gray world, normal and boring. It fails to unlock the brilliance we were born with.
I don't want us all to just be equal. I want every person to be ruthlessly celebrated.
We should reach for celebration as our north star and maybe fall short at equality, not the other way around.
That's the gift I want to give: a path, the tools, and the inspiration to move yourself from oppression to celebration.
When you do that for yourself, you lift your neighbors, your friends, and your community with you. It works for queer men, where I started. And it works for any marginalized people. It works for anyone who has been made to feel small.
What's in a name? Evoke and echo
I named the work Evoco, two words fused together: Evoke, to call forth your true self, and Echo, to reflect it back so it can finally be seen.
When you fully witness the truth of who you really are, both the gold and the shadow, that is where healing happens. When you are truly seen in your own eyes, you are transformed. Because dark cannot exist alongside light.
I work like a coach, not a guru. A coach isn't a teacher, a boss, or a friend. A coach helps prompt you to find the truth and the resources you already have inside you. We all carry hidden resources we can't always see in ourselves. I believe we already have everything we need to build the life we want. Most of the time we just can't see that possibility for ourselves.
I believe every person has everything they need to get anything they want. But you cannot get what you're not aware of, and you cannot get what you don't know you want.
And nobody truly wants it done for them. Being handed the answer never feels as good as discovering it ourselves. Humans are curious, innovative creatures. We need to find things for ourselves, with a helping hand along the way.
A piece of the framework I use comes from the four mature-masculine archetypes: King, Warrior, Magician, Lover (adapted from Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette's work). Each of us has these four energies within us. Each has a gold (its mature power) and a shadow (the part we hide). Most of us have a dominant archetype, and the work is balancing all four to reach a mature masculine way of being.
The proof: my own climb
I didn't invent this philosophy and framework and then live it. This was discovered and captured from my own life and those closest to me over the years. I've distilled it into a framework in the hope of helping others along their journey.
I grew up on a farm outside Dodge City, Kansas, an asthmatic, cleft-lipped kid, the son of wheat farmers. Starting in grade school I was teased and bullied relentlessly, and was given the nickname Gretchen the Fag.
I wanted to get away from those bullies, the fear and the terror, and I learned I could use my intellect and talent as a shield. I tested into the gifted program and got out of standard classes to do advanced studies. So I became a perfectionist, excelled at everything, and got out: graduated early, master's degree, and went to work for one of the biggest internet companies in the world. I propelled myself, at all costs, away from that pain.
Over the next few decades, I did everything the American dream told me to. By my 30s I had the great job title, a great salary, an executive apartment in Chicago and a beautiful condo in West Hollywood. I even had a beautiful husband and a picture-perfect social life.
And I was miserable. None of it had filled the hole deep inside that left me feeling like I'm not good enough and I don't belong. Success had failed me.
The moment it broke for me was on a flight home, in a first-class seat, when the smallest inconvenience launched me into a tirade. I caught myself telling the story later and realized I'd become someone I judge: entitled, out of touch, and mean.
The money, the achievement, the successes hadn't filled the hole. Nothing external does.
So I walked away. I left behind the career, the stock options, the title and the momentum. And little did I know, I was about to lose all the rest too.
Then my marriage ended, and the 2020 pandemic took the rest. All at once I lost every label I'd been hiding behind. I had to find out who I actually was. It was a long, dark and incredibly painful eight years.
But I came out the other side. And this is the gift I get to share now.
Here's what I learned about myself: I have grit. I can rise from the ashes again and again and again. My family did it, bankrupted in the farming crisis of the 1980s, then bankrupt again and rebuilt into a $2.5M FedEx business. I did it from that farm. I did it after the pandemic, when I took a coaching certification, built a practice, and earned my first $60K in six months helping other GBTQ men transform their lives.
Grit is a double-edged sword, though. It also made me a workaholic and a perfectionist, full of anxiety, depression and sleepless nights. Today, the version of me that lasts is the one who keeps his weekends, protects his joy, and nurtures his awareness.
How it shows up in the work
People assume the dealmaking and the healing mission are two separate lives. They're not. It's the same work, the same operating system, just run in two different rooms.
When I sit across from an agency owner, I'm looking at the same ladder I climbed myself. They're stuck. The business they built to set themselves free has quietly become the thing that owns them. They're grinding to make payroll, and somewhere along the way they lost the why that made them start.
My job is to help them climb back up toward celebration: to freedom, to a real why again, and to an exit that hands them their life back. The deal itself is just math, and anyone can run the numbers. The real work is the trust and the motivation underneath it, and that is the part I'm best at.
Because what I actually am, underneath all of it, is a producer of people. I help others gather their scattered pieces and unlock the gift they couldn't quite see in themselves. That's true whether I'm buying an agency or walking a man through the hardest year of his life. Same work, different room.
It's also why I mentor queer founders, both privately and through StartOut, the leading nonprofit organization supporting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer entrepreneurs. And why I'm investing in the queer dealmaker and M&A community inside DealCon. At a recent DealCon event, three of the five people on the dealmaker panel were queer, and two of our funding sponsors were a married lesbian couple running a venture group. We are already in the room. We are already doing the deals. My plan is to lead that community out loud, and one day to back queer founders with a fund of my own.
The ventures
Evoco is my framework and community for moving from oppression to celebration: calling forth your true self, reflecting it back, and one day a home where LGBTQ elders are seen and celebrated, never closeted by age.
The EvocoCenter is a real place I'm building toward: a planned community for 55+ LGBTQ people to retire to in dignity and pride here in Southern California. The long vision is a generative healing community where LGBTQ elders live seen and celebrated, with an event and program center attached. It's a vision I'm holding, and the deals are part of how I intend to fund it.
The reason it matters: we lost 600,000 gay men to AIDS, and with them we lost a generation of our elders, the people who would have shown us how to grow old, gay, and proud, who would have built our retirement villages. A whole generation grew up with no role models for it. The mission is to bring our elders back, to honor that there's a youth, an adulthood, and an elderhood, and that mentorship is how a community heals and evolves itself.
In service
- Co-Director, Yahoo! Pride (2009–2011). Co-led the LGBT employee resource group; Yahoo scored 100% on the HRC Corporate Equality Index four years running.
- Board of Directors, Gay Men's Chorus of Los Angeles (2011–2017); Special Advisor & singing member (2017–2019). For GMCLA's 40th-anniversary season I helped lead its historic partnership bringing Mexico City's Coro Gay Ciudad de México to the U.S. for an opening-night concert at the Alex Theatre in Glendale, welcomed by a host committee that included William Shatner and U.S. Senators Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris. When the visiting choir was held at the border over the sheet music in their luggage, it became a national story about building bridges, not walls. The boutique PR agency I acquired ran the press. Los Angeles Times coverage ↗
- AIDS/LifeCycle. 12 rides over 15 years, 545 miles from San Francisco to Los Angeles; personally raised $100,000+, part of a team that's raised more than $1M to end HIV/AIDS.
- Corporate Relations Manager, Los Angeles LGBT Center (2018).
- Fundraiser, The Trevor Project (2010–2012).
The close
If we can bring celebration to more people, we get a better world: more peace, more love, less of that gaping need that never fills. That's the big why under all of it. The deals are how I'm living it today. The mission is where it's going.