My truth

I was born in Staten Island, New York, and grew up between there and New Jersey. In 1996, I came to Venice Beach and helped found one of LA’s premier event entertainment companies, built from nothing with James Turowski, now a director of this Foundation. We knocked on doors, met people, and prospected, all before cell phones and social media existed. True effort. True entrepreneurs, grinding daily to make connections. For thirteen years, Gold’s Gym on Hampton Drive was part of every week. James still trains with me at Gold’s today. Iron sharpens iron.

Then I went back east and spent fifteen years in private banking in New Jersey and New York City. Many of those years meant two hours on the bus each way, every day. I lived inside the systems that decide who gets trusted and why.

Around 2024, everything restructured at once. The kind of life events that make you question everything. Most of us hit a stretch like that at some point. When life hands you adversity, you have two choices. You can lie down, or you can move, put forth effort, and use movement as medicine. So I did. I trained every day. It was the only thing that made me feel normal.

When I got back to LA in July 2024, I walked back into Gold’s Gym, and nothing had changed. Same walls. Same iron. Right where I left it fifteen years ago, holding my spot.

I started running, too. Back in LA, I reconnected with one of my oldest friends from my hometown in New Jersey, Joey Vecchione, who was training for the LA Marathon at the time. I started training with him. I’ve known Joey since my college days. He’s an entrepreneur who owns Big Sur Grill in Santa Monica, and he’s a friend and a business partner. While I built Performance Equity, we bounced business ideas off each other every day. Today we advise each other.

I ran the LA Marathon in 2025, the OC Marathon six weeks later, and the LA Marathon again a year after that. In between, I kept signing up for race after race: half marathons, 10Ks, 5Ks, you name it.

At the time, training was all I could do to get my head right. Every session was real effort, and none of it counted anywhere that mattered. That’s where Performance Equity was born. I believe the best responsibility a person can have is ownership of themselves, no matter the adversity, the pitfalls, or what life throws at you. Effort is how you earn that ownership. That ownership, that sweat equity, deserves to be honored, and it should open doors.

By the spring of 2025, I’d been back in Venice for almost a year, home from New Jersey. That spring, I ran into Richard Salgado on Abbot Kinney Boulevard, a well-known street in Venice. I knew him from Gold’s Gym in the ’90s, when he was a boxing coach. Back in the pit, the outdoor training area at Gold’s, he’d have me and my friends throw bombs at his fighters while they took the shots. He’d kept training through the years, and now he was a black belt in a discipline I was so curious about. That day on Abbot Kinney, he handed me some Buddhist shaman book with no cover on it. I still don’t know the name of it to this day. He said, “Here. Read it.” I looked at him and thought, “I haven’t read a book in twenty years. I’m probably not going to read this one.” I did open it once or twice and read one or two passages.

Three months later, I called to give it back. He said, “Come train some jiu-jitsu in my garage. Bring the book.”

I was a blank slate, in a discipline I could barely understand, on top of a stretch of life that was already hard. Hard on top of hard. Richard said, “Just keep training, bro. It’s going to go to your soul.”

I fell for jiu-jitsu fast. My training started shifting from long-distance running to jiu-jitsu and boxing. Weight training at Gold’s Gym stayed the foundation, and it always will. Let me tell you something: marathon cardio does not translate to jiu-jitsu. At least not for me, not as a white belt. The learning curve is intense. The breathing, the discipline, the calmness, the patience. The list goes on. I’m still a white belt. I still show up every day, and I look forward to the journey.

I’ve always been an avid combat sports fan. Fighters have entertained me for years, and I respect them greatly. This Foundation is how I give back what they gave me. Prize fighters deserve to be recognized on the way up.

When I came back to Venice in July 2024, I met my landlord and now friend, Brad Neal, a fellow combat sports fan who boxes as a pastime. From the first day, it was “Come to boxing.” He kept after me until I finally went for a session at JFM Boxing. There I met Jordan Muir, the owner, who’s now my boxing trainer and the Foundation’s treasurer. I’m very fortunate to train in such a great, positive environment, and I look forward to spreading the mission inside his facility for many years to come.

From my balcony, I look at a mural of Brad’s son, Brandon Neal, standing at the water’s edge with his surfboard. Brandon was tragically killed in Venice in April 2022. Painted beside him are his words:

Because there’s no safety in definition, inspiration comes from the unknown.

I looked at that wall every day when I started this. Some days, it’s what kept me going. “Performance equity” already had a safe definition: the stock an employee earns at a company as a performance incentive. I took it somewhere less safe and made it synonymous with your work, your effort, your sweat equity. The unknown is where the inspiration lives.

I still train every day. Every session is proof I chose to move.

I built the Performance Equity Foundation to honor everyone who makes that same choice. The ones who show up at 5 a.m. The ones grinding through years nobody sees. Effort is a gateway habit. It should open doors, the same way a good financial habit does.

This is my truth. This is my why. This is my life’s dissertation.