Resume
Open To Roles In:
- Venture Capital Analyst
- Market Research
- Sales
- UI/UX Design
- Project Management (Tech, and Marketing)
- Marketing
- Web/Mobile Dev
- SEO
Things I Look For In A Job:
- Opportunity to build cool and useful products
- A chance to work with smart technical creators
- Performance based pay
- A chance to build wealth (equity)
- Practicing high leverage skills
- Gaining new experiences
- Creative freedom
Education
University of Minnesota Duluth, — Finance and Philosophy; No Degree
Sep 2019 – Jan 2021
Udemy Coursework— The Complete Options Trading Course, Python for Financial Analysis and Options Pricing, The Complete Investment Banking Course
Jan 2019 – Apr 2019
Codecademy, — iOS Developer Career Path Certificate
Oct 2021 – Aug 2022
TaiLopez.com, — SMMA Course (Social Media Marketing Agency) Certificate
Mar 2019 – Aug 2019
Skills
My entrepreneurial endeavors have helped me develop high impact skillsets for going from idea to execution. I have been able to focus on critical aspects of modern business like market research, strategy, and SOTA technologies e.g. AWS and ChatGPT-4o.
- Idea & Strategy: Market Research, Business Strategy, And Pitch Creation
- Brand & Marketing: Brand, Logo, Go To Market Strategy, and Execution
- Design: Wireframe, Mockup, UI/UX Design, SwiftUI, HTML, CSS, Javascript, Canvas
- Team Creation: Talent prospecting, and recruiting
- Tech Stack Design: Defining requirements, and system design
- Tech: Swift (iOS Dev), Python, Version Control, DSA, IDEs (Xcode/VS Code/Jupyter Notebooks), AWS (EC2, route 53, and Lightsail), GCP (Google Places API)
- Management: PM (mobile and web dev), and marketing manager
- Product/Service Design & Creation
Experience
Quest Capital, Somerset, WI
Founder & Equities Analyst
Aug 2018 – Dec 2020
Invested $4,200 of my own money and outside money focusing on trades and investments in consumer tech, bleeding edge tech, tourism, and cannabis equities taking short term and long term positions. Experimented in option trading, buying into: SNAP, TSLA, Cron, and CCL (mid 2018-2021). I averaged 81% return over 2 1/2 year before liquidating holdings to launch my next venture Quest Technologies where I built my own social app.
My roles included:
- Conducting +200 hours of market research. This research was composed of public filings, financial statements, analyzing past performance, and current news.
- Using research to create financial models and simulations to project the probabilities of various outcomes using Pandas, and Scikit libraries as well as Matplot for data visualization.
- Developing, validating, and revising trade ideas based on business fundamentals, and future performance.
- Designing the systems for trading and investment strategies for short and long term time horizons and medium to high risk/reward targets
- Used the Think or Swim platform to plan and execute trade strategies and ideas
Quest Technologies, Minneapolis, MN
Founder & Lead Project Manager
Aug 2020 – Feb 2022
Managed the development of Quest, a social media app that recommends activities to do based on your location. The app was built with UIKit, and Swift and utilized data from the Google Places api for making recommendations.
My roles included:
- Conducting 43 hours of market research to develop a business plan to capitalize on emerging opportunities in the social media space
- Developing, validating, and revising the app idea and features based on 120 in-person interviews of potential customers
- Interviewing 5 software contractors to find the best partner based on company’s needs and resources
- Designing the UI, and app specs for +5 core product features
- Spearheading 2 contract negotiations to obtain favorable pricing, scheduling parameters, and assurances to develop an app prototype with a budget of $12,000
- Taking on integral marketing, graphic design, and brand tasks to get +200 app downloads for beta testing
Quest Inc. (questmn.com | quest-tx.com), Minneapolis, MN
Founder & Lead Project Manager
March 2023 – Present
A social media site that recommends things to do in the Twin Cities. Site features include: user profiles, friends, messaging, events, groups, social feed, custom Twin Cities recommendations feature built on GPT-4, premium memberships, posting (photos, videos, polls, text, links, and more), and article content. Also, provided marketing services for restaurants and epoxy flooring companies. My roles included:
- Developed questmn.com and site content (articles, reference pages, and embedded maps) to get the site ranked for 166 search terms relating to restaurants, bars, and recreational activities in the Twin Cities area with an average search position of 17.8, and an average CTR of 0.7% over a 3 ½ month period
- Making ad creatives and running Facebook ads to help epoxy businesses decrease cost per lead by 78% (compared to leads on Angie’s List)
- Setting up and conducting pitch meetings with business owners to close $9,400 in sales
- Finding, evaluating, and managing overseas contractors (India, Lithuania, and Ghana) to complete quality service fulfillment for ~26-13% of the cost (compared to average U.S. prices) for SEO services, article writing, graphic design, and ad campaigns
- Creating and managing ads and social media campaigns to increase online orders of restaurant clients by over +$27,000 and attract +1,900 new customers over an 8 month period
- Consolidated 8 services into 2 core services designed specifically to help local restaurants grow online sales, and in-store sales.
- Content creation resulting in over 3.3 million views over 8 months across 4 platforms: TikTok (@Quest_mn_), website(Questmn.com), Instagram (@Quest_mn), and Google Maps (Quest MN)
- Prepared and pitched to relatives and friends to raise $4,750 in capital (Debt & Equity)
- Working with OpenAI API to create custom AI for questmn.com
Awards & Achievements
- Hitting $10,000+ in annual revenue from my project/business Quest Inc. (Quest MN, questmn.com)
- Hosting a meetup with 65 attendees (June 6, 2024 @ The Test Kitchen in Minneapolis, MN)
- Speaking at the University of Minnesota Entrepreneurship Club
- Hitting 2,000+ unique monthly visitors for this site (questmn.com)
- Publishing my app to the Play Store and App Store
- Received the UMD Katherine J. and Thomas L. Gibson Academic Scholarship award
- Received the Scott Hanna Baseball scholarship
- Baseball team captain 2017-19
Projects
- Weather app using Swift, SwiftUI, and the OpenWeather Api https://github.com/thebigoccasion/WeatherApp (view “master” branch to view code)
- Coded chat app using SwiftUI, and Firebase
- Crown Clothing Company – Custom clothing business. Sold at crownbybeasley.com (website archived). ~$500 in sales generated
- HappySnacksMSP.com – Generated <$100 in Delta-8 syrup with same day delivery for the Minneapolis-St.Paul area (website archived)
- Salsumn.com (Cutting edge LLM integrated into it, and 1,000+ visits from Google Search)
- Twincities.digital (AI integrated into it)
Why You Shouldn't Hire Me
- Mediocre Organization
- Mediocre Communication
- Lacks Depth In Skills
- Split Focus On Multiple Opportunities
- Forgetful at Times
- Could improve emotion & stress regulation
- Not Always Punctual
Why You Should Hire Me
- Creative
- Bias towards action
- Learn by doing
- Launch often
- Self Motivated
- Focus impact over input
- Experience in technical areas, sales, and management
- Experience with the full tech stack
- Willing to learn difficult subjects and do difficult tasks
- Experience using cutting edge technologies (GPT-4o, Perplexity, and AWS)
- Experience building with little resources
References
Clients:
- Kent Kramp (Owner of The Test Kitchen and former owner of 2 Canes Franchises)
- Russom Solomon (Owner of the Red Sea Ethiopian restaurant)
- Paul Johnson (Rose’s Kitchen)
Contractors & Partners:
- Sammy Farra (Former Co-owner of Quest Inc.)
- Cortez Jones (Former Co-owner of Quest Inc.)
- Aman Chetri (Contactor with Quest Inc.)
- Lenard Redwood (Contractor with Quest Inc. and Twin Cities influencer)
- Bernard Baah (Contractor with Quest Technologies LLC. Owner of Filly coder)
Background Of Quest
Quest was conceived of as a social media app that would help people find the best things to do in their area, but since then has evolved in its vision. It all began after my freshman year of college when I traveled around America in the back of my Prius
Other Business Ideas
Fields I'm Interested In:
- Investments (Public Securities, Private Equity,
- EdTech
- Social Media
- M & A + Advisory Services
Journal
1/25/2025
Currently monitoring $Trump coin. I’ve been averaging in over the last few days and have built up a sizable position (about 73% of my entire portfolio). This is pretty risky, but the volatility and potential upside is also looking pretty good. I’m going to see where it goes over the weekend then sell off a lot of my stake to build up my Chegg position. Currently my $Trump coin position is down about 8% overall. I’m still quite bullish.
Some other things I’m focusing on and need to take care of over the next few days are:
- looking for a new car (haven’t had one since August
- Selling a classic car that was left to me (or at least getting more offers)
- Improving my cash holdings (may need to get some short term debt or expedite the car sale)
- Finish planning of new features that will be launched on my site
- Prepare for a client meeting next week
- Land more business marketing clients
1/24/2025
Currently here are a couple of things I’m excited about.
- Making more casual low production content that is focused around my thoughts, perspective, and work that I’ll be discussing and posting for YouTube
- Building up my portfolio again. I’ll begin dedicating some time in my day to monitoring the markets, conducting and publishing market research, as well as placing trades when good opportunities arise
Currently some news I’m following is the actions coming out of the White House and areas they are taking important actions in like AI, Crypto, and Domestic Manufacturing. Here are some assets and opportunities I’m currently bullish on and have in my portfolio:
- Chegg (Low Medium Risk & Very High Reward)
- $Tump coin (Medium risk & Medium High Reward)
- Bictoin (low risk & medium to high reward)
- McD (low risk & low medium reward)
This is also how I’d rank my current portfolio in terms of highest reward/risk.