Hey, I’m Cole. Thanks for visiting.
I’m an entrepreneur and investor based in San Diego, CA. I live near the beach with my wife, our 2 kids, and our dog Mela.
I’m not really a fan of vague overviews as an introduction. I find you can learn a lot more about someone by talking about specific things they’ve done or are into. So here goes – I’ve broken this up into What I’ve Done and Weird Hobbies.
What I’ve Done
Poker: I played poker for a living from 2005 to 2016.
I started as a sophomore in college, loading $50 of beer money into a PartyPoker account. I quickly busto’d my bankroll and felt the sting of 4 cases of Natty Light going down the drain.
The next week I deposited another $50, hit the library to check out a few books on poker strategy, and vowed to avenge my defeat against GreenPoo69 in the $5 Sit-No-Go tournaments.
This time, following strict bankroll management and a shaky but improving poker strategy, I steadily ran up my balance of imaginary internet money.
I got into online poker at the perfect time. The poker boom was in full swing and the action was incredible. I worked hard on my poker game and eventually rose the ranks to the top of the poker world. I battled a ton against elite players like Phil Ivey, Phil Galfond, Phil Hellmuth, and even a few people not named Phil.
I ran that second deposit up into millions playing poker online as well as in the highest stakes tables in Vegas, Macau, Europe, and Australia.
If you followed poker around this time, you might have seen me trying to bluff Doyle Brunson with 72o on NBC’s Poker After Dark:
Playing huge pots on Full Tilt Poker (shout out to the railbirds):
Or making a couple of deep runs in the World Series of Poker Main event:
E-commerce: In 2015, my wife and I moved to San Diego. I was getting pretty burnt out with online poker. Games were getting tougher, the lifestyle was getting worse with major poker sites leaving the USA market, and it became increasingly hard to find action.
A good friend of mine, David Podgurski, lived in San Diego and was in the same boat. David and I had known each other for 10+ years playing poker and already had a ton of trust built up from a decade of sharing action in games, gambling on credit, and other generally degenerate activities. So I knew we’d make great business partners.
At the start of 2016, we decided we’d launch an e-commerce business. We had no clue what we were doing but we wanted to get some experience “doing business” in some manner.
His wife had the idea for a mid-market pair of baby shoes. She couldn’t bring herself to buy $60 baby shoes for her daughter that would be outgrown in a few months, but the $5 ones dropshipped straight from China didn’t exactly inspire confidence either.
So we launched BirdRock Baby. And then quickly launched 4 more unrelated brands before realizing “hey this is a bit of a mess, maybe we should focus?”
We ended up selling 3 of our 5 brands during the 2019-2021 bull market of private equity gobbling up e-commerce businesses.
Today we still operate BirdRock Baby as well as Gold BJJ, a Jiu Jitsu gear brand which is now our main focus.
Our brands have done tens of millions of dollars of sales on Amazon as well as our own websites.
Outside of e-commerce, I have a side hustle of incinerating money trying to build software projects. Man, software is hard! I’ve learned a lot about software development though, have one small win (PromptFolder, a few grand of MRR), and hopefully will put these expensive lessons to use down the road.
Weird Hobbies
Learning about someone’s weird hobbies is another great way to find out what makes them tick. So here are a few of mine from over the years…
Magic the Gathering: When I was a kid, I was super into the card game Magic The Gathering. I would collect the cards, stay up all night playing against friends, and the company that made the game even flew me out to Seattle for a major tournament.
But alas, eventually losing my virginity became a priority that was incompatible with this hobby. So I hung up the Magic decks and traded them in for poker. Thank God I was unable to find any pictures from this era.
Skateboarding: in middle school, I picked up skating and was completely obsessed with it. I didn’t do any sports, clubs, and took the easiest class schedule possible so I could hop fences with my friends and film skate videos all day.
Skating was a great way to build a tough mindset. It’s the ultimate grit-building sport. You have to try a trick literally thousands of times before you maybe land it once. Still didn’t lose my virginity, but skating brought my coolness factor up from a 2 out of 10 to maybe a 4½.
Jiu Jitsu: as mentioned above, I run a martial arts brand (Gold BJJ). I’m also an avid practitioner of Jiu Jitsu myself, which means I spend good money to wrestle with grown men in our pajamas. It’s pretty cool, I know.
I train and compete quite a bit.
Backcountry skiing: growing up in Virginia, the nearest mountains (if you could call them that) were hills with snowblowers that pounded you with fake snow on your 45 second long ride down. For some reason I loved it. When I moved out to the west coast, I got to see what real mountains were and quickly became hooked.
I’ve spent two weeks on a Russian ice breaking boat ski touring the coast of Antarctica, climbed and snowboarded down Mount Shasta (14,179′), and have done 10+ guys’ trips to cat skiing and heli skiing lodges around British Columbia.
That’s about it! I don’t have anything to sell you, unless you need baby shoes or martial arts uniforms. If you’d like to stay in the loop on what I’m working on, sign up for my newsletter:
Want to bounce an idea off me? Have a dank meme I need to see? Get in touch.