I've always been
drawn to building.
Businesses. Cars. Systems. Technology. I've always wanted to understand how things work — and how to make them work better.
I've been working for as long as I can remember.
I started at 11. By 15, I was working in the pizzeria business. At 22, I opened one of my own.
Looking back, those early years taught me more than how to run a restaurant. They taught me how to deal with people, solve problems quickly, manage moving parts, and take responsibility for the outcome.
That pattern has followed me through every chapter since.
A career built by learning the next thing.
Started Working
I started working young and never really stopped. Work, responsibility, and learning by doing became part of who I was early on.
The Pizzeria Years
By 15, I was working in pizzerias and learning customers, operations, speed, consistency, and the realities of running a small business.
First Business
At 22, I opened my own pizzeria. That was the point where I went from working inside a business to being responsible for one.
A New Industry
Around 30, I moved into the mortgage industry. It was a completely different business, but I learned it quickly and did very well in it.
Merchant Services
Merchant services eventually became my world. I built relationships with hundreds of businesses and became fascinated with payments, recurring revenue, and small-business technology.
Building Technology
Today, I’m building software and business platforms designed around real operational problems — payments, vertical SaaS, and whatever comes next.
Taking things apart has always been part of understanding them.
I've always loved working with my hands. I've rebuilt and restored cars, taken things apart just to see how they worked, and spent countless hours figuring out how individual components fit together.
I've always been good at coordinating moving pieces — mechanical, operational, or otherwise.
The satisfaction is in taking an idea, a problem, or a pile of parts and turning it into something that works.
Payments led me to software.
After years in merchant services, I started seeing the same problems over and over: expensive hardware, complicated systems, and technology that businesses were forced to work around.
About a year and a half ago, I partnered with Sharif Shaltout and we started building PayVella around a simpler idea — give business owners modern tools that actually fit the way they work.
Building PayVella pulled me deeper into software, artificial intelligence, product design, and development.
And somewhere along the way, I realized that building software wasn't all that different from rebuilding a car.
Understand the pieces. Figure out how they connect. Design the system. Troubleshoot what doesn't work. Keep improving it until it does.
Still building.
Today, I'm working across payments, merchant services, and vertical software — including PayVella, CutX, StoreMatrix, ShopTorque, and whatever comes next.
“If you can dream it, you can build it. But vision without action gets nothing done.”
Dream. Design. Engineer. Build.