…is where life sped up and got interesting. The first house I bought was on Foxglove Street. I was newly married and about to head out on deployment for nine months. The house inspector asked my wife if she was sure we wanted to buy this house (the roof was caving in and it had more than a few code violations). It was already more than we could afford, and there were no options with intact roofs for us in the hot San Diego real estate market. We pulled the trigger and bought it anyway.

It was the best decision we ever made. Over the next five years, we made that house incrementally better by investing our hearts, minds and sinew into improvements we could afford. We had a vision of what it could become. It was the beginning of many real estate investments for us, and it is a time in our lives we still treasure. The lessons we learned from that house about ownership and accountability have carried through to my successful pursuits in technology, real estate, leadership, and beyond.

Foxglove Street will always remind me to be humble, work hard, trust the process, and see beauty where others don’t.