Max is an Investment Associate and Chief of Staff at ACME. Prior to ACME, Max was a Strategist at X, Alphabet’s moonshot factory, where his work ranged from shaping product vision for theoretical technologies to financing and valuation for later-stage projects. Previously, Max was a Senior Business Analyst at McKinsey & Company, focusing on growth and innovation strategy for technology and healthcare clients. Max has also worked with QL Ventures on incubating new consumer tech ideas.
Max received his B.S. in Economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and lives in San Francisco.
Nothing could define Max’s childhood better than an overactive imagination.
Growing up in a sleepy New Jersey suburb, Max found the worlds hidden in a book to be far more intriguing than the playground. In elementary school, he got in trouble more than a few times for paying attention to a particularly riveting passage in a fantasy novel instead of the teacher. By 7th grade, Max had devoured the entire Young Adult section of the Livingston Township Public Library and was still hungry for more.
His imagination soon shifted from print to digital. He discovered online fanfiction and fanart, and began fabricating new stories in the Harry Potter and Naruto universes, writing tens of thousands of words in his free time. From there, it was a quick hop over to video games, where he quickly became enthralled with MMORPGs. Whether it was a new friend he made in a loot raid, or a constructive review on his new fanfiction story, he had stumbled onto something magical in those online communities. He finally found other adults that never stopped playing make believe.
In high school, his imagination continued to abound, and he became the editor of the school literary magazine and newspaper. One of his proudest accomplishments was when he made the varsity swimming team after one year, despite no one really believing that he could. It was that moment — manifesting his dream into reality by sheer force of will — that surprised Max and marked his descent from the world of imagination.
In college and in his professional life, Max switched gears and finally gave reality a try, much to the delight of his computer engineer parents. In college, he opted for the “not quite sure what he wanted” route — he was a statistics major in Wharton, but also took the MCAT before deciding on management consulting, the ultimate signal of adolescent uncertainty. After two years of many slides and flights, he moved to San Francisco, learning about technology at Google X and WorkPlay Ventures.
Now, Max has decided he wanted his story to be one that weaves together his professional skills with his personal background as a child of the internet. He’s a dreamer through and through, and armed with the skills to translate imagination to reality, he wants to help others make their dreams come true.
Outside the thread of the main story, he’s also had a couple of crazy interludes– suffering weight loss camp in China, motorbiking through the mountains of Northern Thailand in torrential rainfall, and (somewhat) successful starting his high school’s Philosophy Club. He still hasn’t dropped the arts completely — he has a few sketches and paintings he’s working on, a movie and book review blog, and a couple of personal essays and short stories. Other interests include travel, exercise classes, tennis, and, of course, curling up with a good fantasy book.
