Who I am.

I was fortunate to be surrounded by entrepreneurs growing up on a farm near Bellwood, Nebraska. Entrepreneurship felt real and achievable. My parents ran the family farm and taught me about hard work and the wide variety of things a farmer needed to do to succeed. My grandparents owned a Motorola service center and always showed off the latest technology. One uncle ran a landscape business, the other a law practice. What struck me was that everyone had a purpose. And they genuinely enjoyed the work.

As my interest in technology grew in high school, I started helping with IT systems at my grandpa’s business. That is where I began finding my purpose. I realized other businesses in rural Nebraska needed the same kind of help, and my parents and the David City community supported me as I started my first business, Zimmer Consulting. I am forever grateful that these leaders invested in me at that age. I loved that I could use technology to solve interesting business problems and make people’s lives a little better.

After high school, I attended the Jeffrey S. Raikes School of Computer Science and Management at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. When I met Steve Kiene and Doug Durham, my mind expanded again. Their vision was bigger than one company. They wanted to build a whole series of startups in our community. I realized my own entrepreneurial efforts could have a much broader impact than I had imagined.

That’s how I came to Don’t Panic Labs, where I have been for 15 years. I performed investment diligence for Nebraska Global, drove the launch of EliteForm, and also wrote the original business plan that expanded our mission to partner with innovators throughout our ecosystem.

Teaching has been a theme. I served as Design Studio Faculty at the Jeffrey S. Raikes School from 2008 to 2012, then transitioned to coaching student startups there; I’m now in my 14th coaching year. I also currently teach Information Technology in Healthcare and Education at Nebraska Methodist College. Teaching is how I invest in our future, the way others invested in mine when I was starting out.

The pace of change in our industry unsettles a lot of leaders. I have come to see it as the best opening we have had in years to rethink what we should be doing next. In 2025 I took on the Chief Strategy Officer role alongside the Chief Product Officer role I have held since 2019. This gives me more space to focus on exactly that, both for our partners and for our community.

So what is the thread running through all of it? What I have discovered along the way is that the work I find most meaningful goes beyond the technology. I have watched technology change how athletes train and how nurses catch a patient’s fall before it happens, and the problems worth solving usually live at the intersection of people, ideas, and tools. At the heart of it all is helping people move from uncertainty to purposeful action in a complex world. That belief has shaped every framework I have sharpened, every workshop I have facilitated, and every product I have helped build. If you are building something uncertain, that is exactly the kind of problem I like to be in the room for.