Reading complex systems early. Building what works – and the bridges between.

Through Iota Intel, my independent practice, I take on problems that don't sit neatly inside one discipline. Recent work has run from federal rulemaking across health, environment, consumer safety, and communications, to market and commercialization assessments for ventures entering unfamiliar jurisdictions, to financial and scenario analysis for founders deciding whether a deal is real.

The common thread is method rather than sector. I go to the primary source, build the analysis from it, and stop only when there is something a client can act on. That comes from more than sixteen years with UnitedHealth Group, across both UnitedHealthcare and Optum, in strategy, product, program management, analytics, account management, regulatory affairs, and enterprise execution – most recently leading a regulatory team at Optum that kept policy compliant across the healthcare and prescription-drug delivery chain.

Before that, I was a firefighter. It's an unusual line in a business career, but the instinct is the same: read the situation fast, act on what matters, and stay calm where the stakes are real. Today I run Iota Intel LLC, an independent regulatory intelligence and advisory practice.

A good share of the work is international. Current engagements and active relationships run across Europe, the Gulf region, and Asia, alongside longer-standing ties to entrepreneurship and education programs in Central Asia and the former Soviet Union. I think a good deal about how regulation, and cooperation more broadly, can build bridges between countries rather than friction. This page is the person behind the practice – what I do, what I've written, and what I'm working toward.

MIM, Thunderbird School of Global Management  ·  MBA, W. P. Carey · Arizona State  ·  B.A. International Relations, University of Minnesota

For as long as I can remember, I've made the same bet: that cooperation tends to outperform zero-sum competition, and that the largest problems we face – in security, health, technology, and the environment – get solved by working across borders and taking the best ideas from partners wherever they happen to be. I call it Mutually Assured Prosperity, a deliberate inversion of the Cold War's mutually-assured destruction. Long before I had a name for it, I was living it.

I've worked across more worlds than a single résumé captures, and the instincts showed up early. In grade school, before our district had an ESL program, my teachers asked me to befriend the new kids from Korea and China – and I taught myself enough Korean to read and write it, which I still can. As a teenager I started and ran a real video-production company, filming college hockey and weddings most weekends before I was old enough to drive myself there; one of my pieces eventually aired on ESPN. And before any of the professional work, I was a firefighter, where the instinct turned out to be the same one this work rewards: read the situation fast, act on what matters, and stay steady where the stakes are real.

In the 1990s I spent years in Russia, building businesses in the heart of Siberia in the turbulent period after the Soviet collapse – including one of the first supermarkets in the region. That work was cross-border problem-solving in its purest form: bringing proven practices somewhere they hadn't reached yet. Entrepreneur magazine covered the venture in April 1998, in a feature on building a business in an unfamiliar market. It also gave me a family, fluency in Russian, and a lasting conviction that ordinary people on opposite sides of a divide have far more in common than their governments suggest. I've carried that into decades of citizen diplomacy – work I continue today on the board of a nonprofit devoted to it – an industry advisory role for the commercialization program at AlmaU in Kazakhstan, and, more recently, new relationships and partnerships across the Gulf region.

My interest in healthcare is personal as well as professional. As a young adult, I was treated for non-Hodgkin lymphoma, an experience that gave questions of health, risk, evidence, and uncertainty a different weight. It also shaped how I think about priorities: distinguish what matters from what merely feels urgent, make the best decision the evidence allows, and keep moving even when certainty is unavailable.

What ties it together is a way of seeing. At a biomimetics conference last year, a speaker put it plainly: nature doesn't care what you say or think – only what you do. That's the test I hold myself to. Most problems hold more room for mutual gain than the loudest voices assume, and you prove it by building something, not by declaring it. My work – reading complex rules, building the evidence, finding the workable path – is the professional expression of that same belief: find the win-win where it genuinely exists, and stay clear-eyed about the lines that aren't negotiable. This is the short version; there's a longer story behind each thread, and I'll tell more of it over time.

• a. Strategy, analysis & decision support
  Financial and scenario analysis, market assessment, and investment-committee-style reviews of ventures and deals – the work of separating the two or three variables that actually decide an outcome from the dozens that merely look like they might. Healthcare and benefits are where I go deepest, but the same analytical pattern applies in other regulated and cross-border settings.
• b. Regulatory intelligence & public participation
  Selective depth on the proceedings that will actually move your position, rather than blanket monitoring of every federal and state docket. Filing-grade comment letters written to be read by agency career staff and to hold up afterward, built from the regulatory text itself rather than from a summary of it.
• c. Markets, growth & cross-border work
  Market entry and commercialization for organizations moving into unfamiliar jurisdictions, and the partnership and stakeholder work that decides whether an opening is real. Engagements across the U.S., Europe, the Gulf region, and Asia, usually where the regulatory question and the commercial question cannot be answered separately.

The firm itself – services, engagement models, and the full body of work – lives at iotaintel.com.

These are not simply comment letters. A consequential proceeding usually has to be argued on several fronts at once – the statutory and regulatory text, judicial precedent, the economics, the science and public-health record, the technology, and the operational reality of who has to implement it. Holding those together is the work.

Recent regulatory work also spans consumer product safety reform, advanced robotics and spectrum policy at the FCC, FDA developments affecting peptides, and asbestos-related occupational standards – selective depth on consequential proceedings rather than coverage of everything.

See the full portfolio at Iota Intel ↗

• Framework

  Mutually Assured Prosperity

  An emerging framework I am still developing, not a finished methodology. A deliberate inversion of mutually-assured-destruction logic: the idea that nations, like parties to a rule, often have more room for mutual creation than the loudest players assume – and that good policy can build cooperation rather than friction.

• Science & collaboration

  An appreciation for science, applied across borders

  Living among researchers in Akademgorodok, the Siberian science city, left me with a lasting respect for what rigorous science can do – and a conviction that the hardest problems, from waste and energy to health and the environment, get solved faster when good ideas cross borders. Circular-economy approaches like insect-based bioconversion of organic waste are one example I follow closely. These are areas of genuine interest and exploration, not finished ventures.

• Public health

  Clean water & health spending

  Two threads that connect my regulatory work to bigger questions: the durability of drinking-water protections, and what America's health spending reveals about where regulation helps and where it doesn't – a bridge, too, to healthcare collaboration prospects in the Gulf region.