Launching Sidecar Financial

January 24th was a big day for me. After working on the Sidecar platform since August, we went live with our first customer. It has been quite the journey over the last few months. Back in August I left the insuretech where I was employee number two to start a fintech startup. Sidecar started as an idea, we didn’t even have a name, we were calling it NewCo until after we raised our seed round 😂 Sidecar Financial is a fintech. … »

Be Your Own Coach

This is a technique that came from a great piece of advice I received years ago. It pairs well with the Magic What-If1. The technique stems from a simple question. Is it easier and more straightforward to give advice to others than to yourself? If you find it easier to be someone else’s coach, then this is a technique that may work for you. As with many things in coaching or leadership it sounds easy but can be challenging to implement in the moment. … »

Separate Intention From Achievement

I’ve been thinking about changing the way I think from focus on what is achieved to being deliberate in my intention and accepting being open to what happens. I am not saying that the result doesn’t matter or is something to be ignored. In some cases the result or outcome does not matter in the grand scheme of things. I also think perhaps this shift is about rethinking what is the actual goal. … »

Magic What-If

When I find myself in a new situation, or wrestling with a challenging situation, I use this technique to help prepare and set myself up for success. This is a technique from an acting class that I find to be very helpful in these situations. It’s called the magic what if? The technique is relatively simple, and it may feel awkward the first couple times you use it. As with any skill it gets easier as you apply it over time, and now I don’t even think about it before I use it. … »

Favorite Data Structures

During technical interviews for software engineers I used to ask people what their favorite data structure was. If they didn’t have one or hadn’t thought very deeply about data structures since maybe university, I would tell them that mine was the mighty hash table. Then I would ask them, if you had to build a hash table from scratch (assume one wasn’t available in the standard library of your choice). They could use any language they wanted or pseudo code if they liked. … »