For those who are still with me after a summer of radio silence, thanks for sticking with me. Your patience is being rewarded!

Today, I’m so excited to share the story of Joey Bose, President and CEO of Cytonics. Joey and I have been colleagues and friends after he read this blog post I wrote on his company back in April 2019—a post explaining why I was NOT investing in his company. Ever the good sport, he reached out with a friendly and professional attitude, and years later I was thrilled to invest in a latter round.

All summer, I've been taking a wide range of creative classes—a self-proclaimed  "summer school" of acting, podcasting, and storytelling—to improve my narrative chops in hopes of making my content relevant to a broader audience. It's been a thrilling period of self-rediscovery: I started a Tik Tok series called Creative Means (breaking down how people fund fulfilling lives), spent time building my creative community, and brought all this back to my world of startups and investing.

Joey’s story is the unlikely journey of a struggling academic who struck gold through drugs and dropping out. But more than that, our conversation highlights the insecurities and feelings of a lonely journey towards self-discovery. Telling this story wasn’t easy: our culture often demonizes or exalts business leaders, but never lets them live in that gray zone of being a human. Because of this, I want to give extra shout-outs to Joey for trusting the process and putting his story out there.

You can read part 1 of his story here or watch our video podcast on below:

Let us know how you like it, more storytelling content coming soon!