I was twelve years old when someone murdered my father.
That single act of violence didn’t just take him, it took everything downstream of him. My mother had a nervous breakdown she never fully recovered from. The grief settled into her bones and stayed there for the rest of her life. She raised us the best she could from inside that fog, but there was a lot of pressure on the oldest daughter. A lot of weight that had nowhere else to land.
I dropped out of college my first year. I couldn’t hold down a job and keep up with my studies at the same time, and I wasn't aware I could take out student loans. So I moved back home, back into the environment I’d been trying to escape, and I knew, with absolute clarity, that wasn’t who I was supposed to be. I was just in pain. Profound, unprocessed, fatherless pain. And it fueled everything I’ve done since.
Before I knew what to call it, I was watching my mother do something remarkable.
She worked at the unemployment office her entire career. Not a glamorous job. Not a well-compensated one. She worked until the day she took her final breath, and she died without much to show for it materially, except for one thing. She was the first person in our family to own a home.
When she passed, right before COVID hit, that house was days away from foreclosure. My younger siblings were incarcerated and couldn’t even come to her funeral. My father had been gone for decades. It was up to me.
So I did what I’ve always done when backed into a corner: I moved fast. I enrolled in a tech bootcamp because that seemed like the fastest path to the kind of income that could save her house. They hired me as a teaching assistant before I even finished.
I loved it. I was genuinely happy there, and couldn't believe I was getting paid to learn the product, learn how high-growth companies work, and with a perfect 5 CSAT in Enterprise environment as an individual contributor in support, I felt good. I wasn’t climbing. I was building.
Then I got a manager who hated women, had a drinking problem, and made it his mission to dismantle the confidence of everyone around him. He hired someone specifically tasked with making my life difficult enough that I’d quit. I’m not a quitter. So I pushed through the nightmare until the day I couldn’t anymore.
The week I finally closed on my first home in California, after everything I’d survived to get there, my manager signed off on the paperwork with my bank. Three weeks before Christmas, she laid me off. No prior feedback. No warning. It felt like a personal execution.
I had never been so lost.
My parents were both gone. My savings were gone. I had just signed the biggest financial commitment of my life. And there was no safety net. Not family, not savings, nothing but the fog of betrayal and a complete inability to understand what I was supposed to do next.
I started going through the motions: therapy, volunteering, the PTA, anything to outrun the feeling. And then I started a newsletter, mostly just to vent.
It went viral practically overnight.
Turns out, a lot of people feel exactly what I felt. Blindsided. Betrayed. Unsure where to start or who to trust. Cycling through ten different government websites and support systems with no one to help them make sense of any of it.
The newsletter became a microphone for people without power. A place to name the gatekeepers, decode how the system actually works, and find each other. Within a couple of years, we had sixty thousand readers. They asked for a Slack community. We built one. Local members asked for a physical office. We opened one. We just signed a lease on a bigger space because we’ve outgrown it.
Offboard became real because the need was real. And it keeps growing because that need doesn’t go away.
The moment everything clicked into focus came from an unexpected place.
At my mother’s funeral, I met more people she had helped than family members. Stranger after stranger pulled me aside to say: your mother changed my life. Standing room only for a woman I thought the world had forgotten. A woman who died without fanfare, without wealth, without recognition, but not without impact.
Her former boss told me recently that I had modernized exactly what my mother spent her whole career doing.
She worked in the unemployment office. I built Offboard.
The infrastructure is different. The mission is the same: meet people at the worst moment of their professional lives and help them find their way through.
That’s not where the vision ends, it’s where it begins.
The next chapter of Offboard is about civic redeployment: taking the engineers, project managers, and operators who’ve been laid off from high-growth tech companies and connecting them to the unsexy, urgent problems that nobody in government has the bandwidth or the speed to solve. The DMV. Court infrastructure. Roads. Bridges. Public systems that are decades behind.
Someone who survived three years at a hypergrowth startup can redesign a broken civic process in three months. They just need someone to make the introduction.
That’s what we're building. A bridge between displaced talent and the communities that need them most.
My mother spent her life at that bridge, one person at a time, without the technology to scale it.
We have the technology. We have the community. We have hundreds of thousands of people who know exactly what it feels like to fall through the cracks, and a small crew who are ready to become the ones who catch someone else.
This one’s for Mama.