People often ask me what motivated me to build York IE.
The answer is pretty simple: I lived the startup journey firsthand at Dyn, from the highs, the chaos, the scaling challenges, the capital conversations, the exits, the wins, the mistakes, and the realization that a lot of the traditional startup ecosystem wasn’t actually designed to truly help operators build enduring companies.
After helping scale the business to our relative mountaintop, from a small New Hampshire startup, into a global internet infrastructure company with more than $100M ARR and a mid nine-figure acquisition, I saw both sides of the table presented to me as my next act: operator AND investor.
As folks repeatedly asked me what was next, even while still executing on my last leg, I felt like people were trying to put me in a box and force me, like many successful B2B executives/founders, into broken binary decisions:
- Startup or consultant
- Operator or investor
- Founder or hired-gun
- VC or angel investor
- Services or software
- Horizontal or vertical
- Venture-backed or bootstrapped
- Enterprise or SMB
- Growth or profitability
- Founder-friendly or institutional scale
I didn’t think those tradeoffs had to exist.
So instead of choosing one lane, we decided to build something different entirely. A company that combined advisory, execution, data, services, software and investments under one roof. Operators helping operators. A firm aligned with founders because we’ve actually been founders and builders ourselves. Still are. A firm that we wish we had on our startup scaling journey, that simply didn’t exist.
We had a lot of unique and diverse experience and ALL OF IT was relevant to me in what my co-founders and I wanted to build next in what we now affectionately call our forever company.
A huge part of the motivation also came from growing up in a family business here in this state. I learned early about work ethic, accountability, loyalty, community and building something that lasts longer than yourself. That mindset shaped everything for me.
I’ve always believed startups should take a “market-in” approach instead of just “product-out.” Too many companies build in a vacuum without deeply understanding the ecosystem, customer dynamics and go-to-market realities around them. AI is making this an even bigger problem. York IE was built to close that gap.
At the end of the day, York IE became the intersection of a lot of things for me:
- My belief in entrepreneurship
- My passion for company building
- My obsession with go-to-market and growth
- My desire to create opportunity outside of Silicon Valley
- My goal to make as large an impact as possible and give back
- …and my belief that founders deserve more aligned partners
Most importantly, I wanted to build a platform and a community that could create jobs, help founders realize their visions, generate generational wealth, and make a meaningful impact far beyond ourselves. We’re well on our way!
