I didn’t have a master plan.
I knew what I wanted before I knew how to get there.
I worked on cars, moved into the corporate world, and spent years playing guitar in bands and trying to see how far music could take me. We had some success, toured around the U.S. and Canada, and played with artists who seemed like they had made it. Then you’d find out some of those same people still had day jobs.
That was probably one of my first real lessons in the difference between loving something and building a life around it. What I did know was that I wanted to work for myself someday. I wanted more control over my time, what I worked on, and where my life could go. I just hadn’t found the vehicle yet.
Then I found real estate.
Around 2012, I started looking for my first house and, like I tend to do when something catches my attention, I started reading everything I could about it. That led me into real estate investing.
What fascinated me wasn’t just the idea of owning property. It was how many different paths existed inside one industry. Rentals, flips, lending, wholesaling, development, brokerage, businesses built around investors. There wasn’t one ladder to climb. There were a hundred different directions you could take.
My first real estate transaction wasn’t even buying a property. I made a small loan to another investor and started receiving payments from it. Seeing money show up in the mailbox because of an investment I had made was a pretty powerful idea. Not long after that, I sold what was my dream car at the time and used the money to help buy my first three properties in 2013.
The car was gone, but something much bigger had started.
I traded something I wanted now for something I thought might give me more options later.
Selling that car to buy real estate felt like a big sacrifice at the time. Looking back, it was one of the first decisions that set everything else in motion.
For a few years, real estate was still the thing I did on the side.
I kept my corporate job and continued buying rentals, but the more time I spent around real estate, the more certain I became that I wanted it to become my actual career. The problem was figuring out how to get in.
In 2016, I went to a local real estate investor meetup with a very different mindset than I had before. I wasn’t going just to learn something. I walked into that room having decided that I was going to find a way to work in real estate full time.
A few weeks later, I started testing the waters working with a local hard-money lender. A few months after that, I left my full-time job. That decision changed the trajectory of my life.
Real estate became my career.
I spent the next several years in private lending, first with a smaller local lender and later with a larger company. During that time, I originated roughly $70 million in real estate loans while continuing to invest on my own.
It was exactly what I had been looking for. I was surrounded by investors, deals, properties, lenders, operators, and entrepreneurs every day. I got to see thousands of transactions from a completely different side of the table.
And somewhere during those years, another idea entered the picture.
Lending gave me a front-row seat to how investors actually operate.
Those years sharpened how I thought about deals, operators, risk, and what real estate investors actually need. A lot of that perspective eventually found its way into how I think about Wholster today.
Wholster started much smaller than what it has become.
The original idea for Wholster came from another business partner. It was a relatively simple concept at the time: there had to be a more efficient way for investors and wholesalers to move properties, and as someone who had spent years buying deals myself, I also wanted better access to inventory.
When it was time to actually start putting the company together, one of the first people I went to was Josh, someone I had known for years from playing in bands together. He helped me start building Wholster and remains part of the venture today, which is one of those strange connections between completely different chapters of my life that I probably never could have planned.
We started building in 2018. It took longer than expected. The product changed, the team changed, COVID happened, and we learned a lot of things the hard way. Over time, I also realized the opportunity was much larger than the original concept.
Moving a deal was only one part of the problem. Finding opportunities, understanding properties, reaching owners, identifying real buyers, marketing inventory, and actually getting transactions across the finish line were all connected. That broader idea became the vision I started building Wholster around.
Then I moved to Austin.
Real estate was part of the reason. Technology was part of the reason. And, admittedly, racing was part of the reason too. Motorsport had been something I loved for most of my life, and I wanted to be somewhere that made more room for it.
By then I had also reached a point where I was ready to leave the lending world and put more of my attention into my own investments and into Wholster.
Austin gave me more room for the life I wanted to build.
It put me closer to the intersection of real estate, entrepreneurship, technology, and a lifestyle that felt more aligned with who I was becoming.
Somehow, the car came back into the story.
In 2013 I sold a car I loved to buy real estate. Years later, real estate gave me enough independence to move across the country partly because I wanted more opportunity to race. Today, Wholster is plastered across the side of my rally car. I couldn’t have planned that if I tried.
The company, the team, and the vision kept growing.
We launched the first version of the Wholster app in late 2022. Since then, the company, the team, and the vision have continued to grow.
Today, building Wholster is my primary professional focus, and what we’re building now is substantially bigger than where we started.
I’ve picked up a lot of interests along the way.
Music never disappeared. Neither did cars. Photography has been part of my life for roughly twenty years, and I eventually found my way into film too. I’ve been involved in several projects as an executive producer and even got to participate in a film premiere at Cannes in 2025.
I train, travel, race when time and money cooperate, still play guitar, and generally seem to keep accumulating new things I want to try. I’ve never been especially interested in building a life where work becomes the only thing in it.
Photography
Music
Travel
Film
The freedom real estate eventually gave me mattered because it created more room to decide what I wanted that life to look like. I’m incredibly grateful for that.
I spent a lot of my early life feeling like I was supposed to know exactly where I was going.
I didn’t. My career has gone from cars to corporate work to music to real estate investing to lending to building a software company, and very little of it happened according to a plan.
But there was a point where things started changing faster: I chose a direction and started walking toward it deliberately.I didn’t know that walking into one real estate meetup in 2016 would lead to lending, Austin, Wholster, or any of the life I have now. I just knew I wanted real estate to become my path.
Sometimes that’s enough. You don’t necessarily need to know where the road ends. You may just need to choose one worth following.