So, I was born in Romania and emigrated through Germany and Portugal before coming here with my parents when I was 11. At that time, my dad told me about someone named Richard Branson, so I started getting very fascinated with entrepreneurship and my dad, even though he was an engineer by trade, he’s very entrepreneurial-minded and always encouraged me to follow my dreams. Both of my parents really posed America as being the land of opportunity and our goal and dream was always to come here.So fast forward a little bit and I was part of a side business coming out of college which was a night club promotions company, so that was my first odd foray into entrepreneurship and the other part of my early career was technical recruiting and account management for large companies and startups. So even though I wasn’t an entrepreneur per se, I was able to see companies fail and succeed at a very rapid rate, with a lot of flavors of companies.
Then I moved into my first real entrepreneurial venture, which was Soundstrokes Art: we would take the visual wave form of your favorite sound and make it into a high end painting so you could get the waveform painting of your favorite song, your baby’s heartbeat or you saying “I love you” to your partner. And it was at that venture that my Co-Founder Adrienne Trewolla, she’s my best friend today, she sat me down and she said, “hey you have a really big substance abuse problem”. I thought she might be right.
I didn’t know anything about recovery. I didn’t know I had a chronic illness and so I tried to stop on my own for 18 months. I moved back to Seattle from LA and I finally ended up in inpatient. So, it was in inpatient that I learned a couple things. The relapse rate is alarmingly high… this affects 1 in 7 people in the US and when I walked out of treatment, they handed me a piece of paper that was my recovery plan, and they just said, “hey this is what you are supposed to do everyday for the rest of your life”. So, of course the relapse rate is high. I mean, just getting a piece of paper after 28 days of sobriety after using for eleven years, is a really incredibly irrational expectation of someone.
So I thought, there’s gotta be a better way. And the funny part, to circle back to how I became an entrepreneur, I had journaled about this idea in inpatient after getting all these data points and I was sitting there in my sober living house, and I was like 60 days sober and there was a contest online by a company called ‘BUCKiTDREAM’, and it said, “submit your bucket list item; we will pick the top three most creative submissions on the list and the winner gets to go to Necker Island and meet Richard Branson”.
Then I moved into my first real entrepreneurial venture, which was Soundstrokes Art: we would take the visual wave form of your favorite sound and make it into a high end painting so you could get the waveform painting of your favorite song, your baby’s heartbeat or you saying “I love you” to your partner. And it was at that venture that my Co-Founder Adrienne Trewolla, she’s my best friend today, she sat me down and she said, “hey you have a really big substance abuse problem”. I thought she might be right.
I didn’t know anything about recovery. I didn’t know I had a chronic illness and so I tried to stop on my own for 18 months. I moved back to Seattle from LA and I finally ended up in inpatient. So, it was in inpatient that I learned a couple things. The relapse rate is alarmingly high… this affects 1 in 7 people in the US and when I walked out of treatment, they handed me a piece of paper that was my recovery plan, and they just said, “hey this is what you are supposed to do everyday for the rest of your life”. So, of course the relapse rate is high. I mean, just getting a piece of paper after 28 days of sobriety after using for eleven years, is a really incredibly irrational expectation of someone.
So I thought, there’s gotta be a better way. And the funny part, to circle back to how I became an entrepreneur, I had journaled about this idea in inpatient after getting all these data points and I was sitting there in my sober living house, and I was like 60 days sober and there was a contest online by a company called ‘BUCKiTDREAM’, and it said, “submit your bucket list item; we will pick the top three most creative submissions on the list and the winner gets to go to Necker Island and meet Richard Branson”.
I entered the contest and I ended up winning. By this time I had already prototyped my idea for WEconnect along with Co-Founder Jen Mallory, and it was as a result of that trip that I met one of my other Co-Founders Murphy Jensen, who used to be a professional tennis player. He currently coached his pros, and he’s been in long term recovery for 12 years.
Another piece to add about entrepreneurship, a lot of people ask me why or how this happens. I feel like it’s like a musician writing music, or an author having to write, or an actor having to be in films. To me it’s the way that I express myself; it’s built in. Some people call it naive optimism, but the more roadblocks that I see, the more obstacles I know I can overcome. I just have to keep going. It’s not something that I get a choice in.
I don’t think I could be happy being an individual contributor to a large company. It would just be impossible for me.
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