Silicon Desert

This year has been a wild ride.

I spent a year and a half in the United States Army, training within the Military Intelligence community at the Presidio of Monterey. Can someone say.. EYE opener. To briefly see the inter-workings of our government was a bit fascinating and also terrifying at the same time.

We will leave it right there.

For 20 weeks, I studied Russian through full immersion: seven hours of language instruction, native-speaking teachers, constant listening, and physical training afterward—five days a week.

At the same time, I was building The Zen Creative.

I was taking on retainers, developing strategy, creating identities, working alongside founders, and learning on the fly. My days belonged to one institution, while my early mornings, evenings, and weekends were devoted to building another.

That contrast clarified something in me.

Zen began before the Army was ever an option. It started as my next attempt to deepen my entrepreneurial and venture-building abilities.

Over time, it became something more: a conduit for increasing the volume and quality of my repetitions.

Through Zen, I learned how founders think. I began recognizing what separates compelling ideas from durable ventures, where I could add value directly, and when the greater contribution was bringing the right people into the room.

The more I worked with founders, investors, and ecosystem builders—particularly across Europe and Africa—the harder it became to ignore where my attention naturally wanted to go.

Once I saw that this path was possible, I couldn’t take my mind off it.

My background has always placed me between worlds. I grew up across middle-class Black and Hispanic communities while also spending time in predominantly white towns and on golf courses, where my first job was working as a caddie.

I attended an all-boys preparatory school, Christian Brothers Academy, where it seemed as though everyone’s parents were lawyers, doctors, or Wall Street bankers.

Later, I worked on Wall Street, built a wellness venture, experienced its collapse, and eventually entered military service within the realm of intelligence.

Each environment had its own language, incentives, customs, and version of success. Moving among them taught me how to observe institutions from the inside. It also made it easier to recognize the distance between what an institution says it values and what it rewards in practice.

The Army gave me discipline, structure, and a deeper respect for service. It also gave me enough contrast to understand that my long-term path existed elsewhere.

That realization wasn’t immediate or comfortable. For a while, my mind raced as I tried to understand what the next chapter could become. I knew I wanted to prosper, but prosperity alone was no longer enough. The work also had to align with the moral and ethical framework I've spent years developing.

I thought often about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Looking back, I had been climbing that ladder vigorously without fully realizing it. Survival became stability. Stability created room for ambition. Ambition eventually gave way to the harder question of meaning.

Once that journey became conscious, it was impossible to return to sleep.

During some of my darkest hours, I began asking—sometimes only in a whisper—for a path forward. I wanted a creative life that could help founders, investors, and ecosystem builders work more closely together. I wanted to contribute to an industry that remains unnecessarily siloed and unapproachable to many of the people capable of shaping its future.

That path ultimately led me out of the Army and into the desert.

Palm Springs is not Silicon Valley. That is part of its appeal.

The desert creates distance from the noise. It offers enough stillness to distinguish signal from performance, conviction from momentum, and a meaningful direction from one that merely looks impressive.

This is my Silicon Desert: a place to build with greater intention.

The next chapter of Zen will bring together the experiences that once appeared disconnected—Wall Street, entrepreneurship, military intelligence, design, global founder relationships, and the inner work required to move through reinvention.

The goal is not simply to build another agency or consultancy. It is to create clearer pathways for bold ideas to take form—and to help founders, ventures, and emerging ecosystems move with greater clarity, creativity, and calm execution.

I don’t have every part of the path mapped yet.

But I know I am standing in the right terrain.

Find your center with #ZEN