Co-founder and COO of Carpe, an antiperspirant brand he started when he was a freshman at Duke
BECAUSE OF DUKE: “I absolutely wouldn’t be where I am today without the community of brilliant and generous people that I met at Duke. My co-founder, David Spratte, and I were both Robertson scholars dual-enrolled at Duke and UNC when we met and started Carpe together. This company wouldn’t exist without that meeting, without the Robertson, without Duke. When we started prototyping the first Carpe formula, we had no idea what we were doing business-wise, and Howie Rhee at Duke I&E connected me with so many incredible alumni who were so excited to teach us, such as Melissa and Doug Bernstein through their incredible program for student entrepreneurs. At the forefront of our mentor group were Ben Feldman, Jay Mebane and Chris Cashin – three Duke alumni and entrepreneurs still based in Durham, who invested in Carpe and showed David and me how to actually start selling our first product. As Carpe grew, as dermatologists started recommending it and we needed to expand production, Duke Angel Network (now Duke Capital Partners) became our lead investor and enabled us to go from thousands of Carpe users to millions.”
VISION: “I’m with Sartre and the other existential philosophers on this: We each define what matters in the world. It’s a personal choice with public consequences, and I think that for many of us it’s deeply intuitive, whether we want to devote our lives to fun or community or certain projects with certain objectives. n
THE SPECIAL SAUCE: “Love, focus and determined optimism are all you need.”
"For me, it’s always felt obvious that I want to, on net, make life better for as many people as possible, relative to what their lives would be like had I never existed. This doesn’t just mean that I want to do good, or create things that will benefit people, but rather that I want to create things that are unlikely to have been created in my absence. That paradigm has led me straight to entrepreneurship – and specifically an entrepreneurship where I’m creating something genuinely novel. For me, authentic success is to significantly improve life for a lot of people.”