Impact infrastructure▪
Poly capital ecosystems▪
Impact finance▪
Enterprise (re)formation▪
Ecological economics▪
Founder transitions
The Journey
The red thread
I have never not worked for impact. What my training in ecology and economics gave me was the eye to see why so much of that work stalls: the same structural pattern that traps a person in a leadership habit that no longer serves them shows up, at a different scale, in an organization that has outgrown its operating model — and again, at a much bigger scale, in the democracies and planetary systems now straining under what we call the polycrisis. These patterns are fractal. Once you learn to see them at one altitude, you start seeing them at every altitude — and you start being able to build the plumbing and the bridges that get a person, an organization, or a system from where they're standing to where they need to be.
Seeing the pattern
That fractal instinct is why my career doesn't look like one straight line. It shows up in coaching conversations with leaders working through their own stuck patterns. It shows up in how I've designed and redesigned organizations to be future-proof rather than just fixed for now. And it shows up in the tools and methods I've helped build for mobilizing data in ways that serve people and planet — from the participatory approach that shaped how California and other places designated marine protected areas, to the infrastructure Armillaria is building to mobilize people, innovations, and capital for the Sustainable Development Goals. Different scale, same underlying move: find where the structure is broken, and build what's needed to cross it.
Three degrees across three countries — economics and philosophy at St Andrews, economics at Bristol, ecological economics at Berkeley — equipped me with the academic credentials for this work, followed by 25+ years working in various social enterprises. But the instinct itself came earlier and has never left: refuse to accept that the things we care about most don't belong on the balance sheet, and go build the infrastructure that lets us account for them properly.
Ecotrust: building the practice, then running the institution
I spent fourteen years at Ecotrust, a hybrid conservation and development organization, where I started as an ecological economist working on community-based fisheries management on the West Coast. I built and ran the organization's knowledge systems practice from scratch, growing it into a 16-person profit center doing economic, GIS, and policy analysis — work that fed directly into the participatory methodology behind sizable networks of marine protected areas, such as those in California. By 2012 I was EVP, and by the end of that year President, running a $12 million, 70-person organization with $250M+ in assets, through a founder transition. Founder transitions are where organizational theory meets organizational reality, and reality rarely reads the textbook. I rebuilt structure, operations, and fundraising strategy simultaneously, kept a mission-driven staff and board aligned through the disruption, and positioned the organization for a $25 million capital campaign.
The departure
Leaving an institution you helped build is its own discipline, and I have a name for the failure mode most leaders hit in moments like this: the departure deficit. It's what happens when you know the current model is broken but freeze at the point of actually leaving it, because the old model still offers the comfort of credentialed confidence, financial security, and the familiarity of the status quo. I left anyway, in 2014, to found my holding company Doch LLC and start building what I'd concluded the sector actually needed: not another program, but infrastructure.
Building infrastructure for the SDGs
The impact tech company Armillaria is the direct result of that conclusion. We build digital infrastructure — most visibly the Innovation Exchange — for mobilizing data, people, and capital toward the Sustainable Development Goals. Our thesis, laid out in "Billions to Trillions," is that the $200 trillion SDG financing gap isn't a shortage of capital. It's a shortage of shared, sovereign data infrastructure that would let capital actually find the problems worth solving. We've applied that thesis everywhere from a Gates Foundation WASH knowledge management diagnostic to a proposed city-owned data stewardship layer for the EU Cities Mission network.
Movement as infrastructure
Zebras Unite, which I co-founded in 2017 and where I still serve as Treasurer, is infrastructure of a different kind: a global movement across 30+ countries, of founders and investors building businesses that don't have to choose between growth and good. I led the Capital Circle, developing financial instruments and inclusive capital ecosystems for the movement's members. The framework has traveled further than I expected — it's been adopted into Japan's federal economic planning under the Kishida administration, going from idea to shaping national policy in seven years.
Story as technology
Together with a group of seasoned narrative architects and experience designers, I co-founded StoryQuo: a company creating narrative interventions in the systems we want to see change, using empathy rather than argument to change how people see the incentives trapping them. It's the same translation instinct in a different medium. Structures are hard to redesign until people can feel — not just understand — why the current one fails them.
Finding family
FLEX Collective, alongside Amy and Dana, is part of what I'm building to be in the company of fellow travelers: a way to bring twenty-five years of pattern recognition, at every altitude, to organizations that know something fundamental has to change but haven't yet named what.
Core values & approach
We've seen this before
Fractal systems thinking
Translator across altitudes
Data before capital
Name the gap, don't elude it
Peer, not supplicant
If you're coming to FLEX in a moment of crisis, confusion, or chaos, the first thing I want you to know is that we've seen this before. Not your exact circumstances, but the shape of it: the moment a person, a team, or an organization realizes the old operating model has stopped working.
My job in that moment is to operate at the altitude between theory and implementation — translating the necessary into the practicable, the innovative into the doable, the systemic into something tangible enough to act on this week. That means naming the actual gap in a system honestly, even when it's uncomfortable, because you can't redesign around a limitation you won't name. It shows up in how I coach leaders, how I advise boards, and how I write a proposal: point of view first, hedging last.
Collaborations
Armillaria / Innovation Exchange
Digital infrastructure for mobilizing data, people, and capital toward the SDGs.
Zebras Unite
Global movement of founders and investors; 5,000+ members across 30+ countries. Framework adopted into Japan's federal economic planning.
Game the System
Serious games turning systemic dysfunction into felt experience.
Ecotrust / California MPA design
Participatory marine protected area methodology, still visible in California's coastal waters.
Gates Foundation WASH diagnostic
Knowledge management strategy for the Sustainable Sanitation program.
"Billions to Trillions"
Co-authored framework on the $200 trillion SDG financing gap.
Latin American Ocean Capital Collective
Capital ecosystem design across the Mesoamerican Reef corridor — Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Belize.
Port of Portland, 2023 Discovery Phase
Oregon economic development strategy.