About
I’m JDM 🤘
I build ventures — and increasingly, systems for building better ventures.
I don’t believe in startup theater. Early-stage companies don’t need more performance. They need better evidence: evidence that customers care; that growth can be predictable, repeatable, and scalable; and that investors can have conviction in what comes next.
That’s the work I do at Traction Lab, a venture-building laboratory I co-founded to help pre-seed and seed-stage companies turn uncertainty into evidence, and evidence into growth.
We work hands-on across startup growth, investment readiness, and venture science—finding early paying customers, building repeatable paths to growth, evaluating companies, pressure-testing assumptions, preparing for capital, and increasingly working across portfolios rather than with startups in isolation.
I’ve evaluated 3,000+ startup pitches over my career and now evaluate 500+ early-stage companies annually across Traction Lab and external venture programs and competitions. I also help design and operate venture-building initiatives, support founders through fundraising and investment readiness, and increasingly work on capital formation through SPVs.
Teaching has been a through-line throughout my career. I’ve designed entrepreneurship curricula and accelerator programs, facilitated 50+ multi-day startup competitions, taught founders and students at universities and accelerators, and spoken about entrepreneurship and innovation in the U.S. and abroad.
Earlier in my career, I founded a startup, advised dozens of companies, and was acqui-hired to lead an innovation consultancy that we later sold.
The through-line has stayed surprisingly consistent: figure out what’s actually true, identify the next important uncertainty, and run the fastest useful experiment to resolve it.
Some people have called me “the shredder of business models.” I choose to take it as a compliment.