He did not grow up around boardrooms. He grew up around a dinner table that rarely had only family at it. Exchange students from Japan, Germany, and Uruguay. Six Laotian refugees, a husband and wife, his sister, and three girls under six, who arrived with almost nothing. Conversation happened across accents and across cultures because there was no other way to have it.

That table was the first education, and everything since has been the same lesson at larger scale.

He started working at eleven, filing patient records in his father’s orthopedic clinic, then florist, house painter, paper route, retail, event setup. He got his first stage role at nine and acted in thirty productions before twenty, where he learned that the names on the marquee are not the show. The show is the stage manager, the costumer, and whoever runs the lighting board. He also learned to stand in the green room before curtain and tell whether it would be an A show or a C show, not from the script, but from whether the people in the room were together.

At nineteen he went to Kyushu and spent two years inside Japan. He came home convinced that language is absorbed rather than studied, so he majored in Japanese, minored in Asian Studies with Chinese and Korean alongside it, and at twenty-two went to Taiwan to do the immersion again in Mandarin, studying Chinese and teaching English to executives thirty years his senior. By that year he had been to all fifty US states, eight Canadian provinces, and nineteen countries.

He married Nanako in 1987, and when they moved to Tokyo in 1989 it was to her country, not a posting. He spent five years there opening Asian markets for American brands and Hollywood studios. Getting a single copy protection standard adopted meant working across three continents at once: the American company behind it and the Hollywood studios who needed it, the manufacturers in Japan, Korea, and Hong Kong who would have to build it, and Philips in the Netherlands and Thomson in France. Back in the States he built two Pacific Rim divisions, recruiting seventy-five resellers across ten countries.

Then twelve years at the University of Illinois running copyright, software, and trademark licensing, and an international Executive MBA on a Provost’s full tuition scholarship earned partway through. Five years in, the operation was struggling, and he told them the problem was structural rather than tactical. Then the Japan Patent Office asked him to spend four months in the Kobe region designing how technology transfer would actually flow between universities and research institutions there, under Japan’s newly passed equivalent of the Bayh-Dole Act. He came back and rebuilt the Illinois business model around the diagnosis he had given before he left. More than twenty years later, the office still runs on it.

Then five years directing commercialization at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, handling more than 250 technologies. They recruited him to clean up an open-source licensing problem using the policy framework he had already built at Illinois. It became the standard at the laboratory, and then across the Department of Energy.

Then nine years in Doha, building Qatar’s first technology transfer operation from nothing: thirteen organizations, eight universities, three national laboratories, more than sixty nationalities, and no shared system to inherit from anyone. The operation produced forty licenses and seven startups.

From a certain point on, he stopped looking for work and the work came looking for him. At UMI Japan, someone who had been watching him asked him to come run the operation while the owner rescued another business, and he was made a torishimariyaku, a director with legal signing authority, in his twenties, in a Japanese company. The University of Illinois came through an attorney who knew their new technology transfer office needed someone who understood software. The laboratory came for the open-source problem. Qatar came for what he built at the laboratory, and Saudi Arabia was recruiting him at the same time. Each of those was someone else deciding the work was worth importing, and each one meant walking into a system he had no part in building and making it produce something.

Sixteen years of his life lived outside his own country. Different decades, different sectors, the same problem every time. Capable people, each certain their way is the normal one, who have to become one thing.

After thirty-five years of watching capable people carry organizations on their own back, including his own, he wrote down what it costs and what to build instead.

Jack Canfield has called him a visionary. He is a four-time published author, and delivered a TEDx talk in New Cairo, Egypt in October 2025 with more than 102,000 views. Stop Holding It Together, with a foreword by Canfield, releases this fall.