Bio
Would you believe that PartnerStack started out as a pretty bad version of Slack just 4 years ago? Let me take a step back and start at the beginning. My background I was a competitive swimmer growing up (yes, the very beginning - I promise it’ll be quick) and swam at international meets around the world from 2009-2011. In 2010 I got sick with what turned out to be swine flu, immediately followed by pneumonia. It was brutal and I had to take time off swimming. Feeling out of shape, I joined an intensive training camp at altitude in Arizona that ultimately pushed my body to the limit when I wasn’t in peak shape and caused my organs to swell. It was pretty detrimental and my body was never the same after. I finished my varsity year of swimming and was voted male athlete of the year, but that was the end of my competitive swimming career. That competitive spirit never left me, however, and it’s how I ended up at Western learning how athletes transition out of swimming into careers. And with the extra 30 hours I had back each week now that I wasn’t swimming, I had the time and energy to dedicate to a new pet project. PartnerStack’s 4 co-founders came together in 2014. Luke Swanek and I had been friends for 7 years when we met our other co-founders, Neil Chudleigh and Jon Mendes in grad school at Western. We were all in a business accelerator program there where we started working on a company we called Pod.