My Role Models and Why

Updated as of March 2023

Here’s the raw list of my role models and why I admire them:

• Benjamin Franklin: Prolific inventor, founder of America’s postal system, news paper publisher, and diplomat who helped secure French support for the Revolution while building libraries, fire departments, and early civic infrastructure
• Kris Jenner: Started a reality show at 52 and turned a family into a multi-generational business empire through relentless deal-making, brand control, and media instinct
• Tim Ferriss: Turned self-experimentation into a lifestyle, brand, and business by treating his own body, mind, and career like a living lab
• James Cameron: Drove trucks, taught himself filmmaking in libraries, and built three of the biggest movies in history through obsession with technology and world-building
• Jesse Itzler: Went from rap jingles to a billion-dollar exit to Warren Buffett, ultramarathons, and constant self-designed stress tests to keep reinventing himself. Also, very intentional about building his family with his wife, who founded Spanx.
• George Washington: My favorite fun fact is that at 22, Washington as a British Officer accidentally sparked the 7-Years War with the French in 1754 by firing the first shot. He would take those lessons and many more to become America’s first president.
• Arnold Schwarzenegger: Went from broke Austrian immigrant to Mr. Olympia legend, Hollywood icon, Governor of California, and billionaire. My favorite story: he made more money from his role in “Twins” with Danny Devito than every single Terminator movie combined.
• Kevin Ryan: Built DoubleClick, then AlleyCorp, then helped create Business Insider, MongoDB, Gilt, and Zola as a repeatable company factory
• Jensen Huang: Played a 30-year game turning Nvidia from a graphics chip company into the backbone of modern AI and compute. His life in 1-sentence: “My will to survive exceeds everybody else’s will to kill me.”
• Nolan Bushnell: Helped invent video games, created Atari and Chuck E. Cheese, and turned technology into a physical cultural experience
• Bill Campbell: From Columbia’s former head football coach to Silicon Valley’s “Trillion Dollar Coach” that counseled Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, Sheryl Sandberg, and leaders who built the modern tech economy.
• Lee Kuan Yew: Took a poor island nation and ran it with a disciplined long-term view that built Singapore into what it is today.
• Condoleezza Rice: Stanford Provost, National Security Advisor, US Secretary of State, and was even interviewed to be the head coach of the Cleveland Browns.
• Steve Jobs: Got fired from Apple, failed for a decade, then used Pixar and NeXT to quietly rebuild the operating system of modern tech and culture
• Oprah Winfrey: Turned childhood trauma into empathy, empathy into trust, and trust into one of the most powerful cultural platforms ever built by one person
• Charlie Munger: Lost an eye, lost a marriage, lost a child and then turned mental models and discipline to create the intellectual foundation of Berkshire Hathaway with Warren Buffett. An unbelievable, but true fact: if Berkshire Hathaway's stock lost 99% of it's value, it would've still outperformed the S&P 500 since 1965.
• Taylor Swift: Started off by writing tens of thousands of personal messages to early fans, turned songwriting into IP ownership, and built one of the strongest direct-to-fan platforms in entertainment history
• Leonardo da Vinci: A thinker centuries ahead of his time who fused art, anatomy, engineering, and imagination into a single mind that still feels modern 500 years later
• Anne Sullivan: Took a child who couldn’t see, hear, or speak and unlocked language and consciousness through sheer persistence and method
• Parents of the Rahm Emanuel Brothers: Raised a Hollywood billionaire (Ari), a top-tier statesman and Chicago mayor (Rahm), and a nationally influential physician and policy architect (Zeke) - who all seem to remain close to this day.