From markets to mastery.

I grew up as an only child in a refugee household in New York City, trying to understand how the world really works.

From an early age, I saw that institutions often reward signals before they reward substance, which shaped the way I think about education, credentials, merit, and human potential.

At Bronx Science, I was exposed to serious academic expectations, and the debate team gave me a method for thinking under pressure: breaking complicated problems into claims, evidence, incentives, tradeoffs, systems, consequences, and competing interpretations of truth.

I spent years studying systems where measurement matters.

I learned, then taught foreign exchange (Forex) trading straight out of undergrad, and began experimenting with early neural networks to model forex pricing — long before AI became the center of public attention.

I helped build financial exchange infrastructure, starting with Panafex, the Pan African Financial Exchange at the Lake Victoria Free Trade Zone in Uganda, and later Caufex in the Republic of Georgia.

Later, at Cardozo Law School, I studied patent, corporate, and securities law. I wrote about financial instruments, particularly single stock futures.

After law school, I worked across hedge fund analysis, family office operations, global supply-chain systems, financial technology, education technology, and international energy-policy initiatives.

Those experiences taught me to see the world through systems: incentives, rules, measurement, feedback, risk, accountability, and execution.

Eventually, I began asking why education wasn't built the same way.

If markets, logistics, finance, and operations can measure performance continuously, why does education still rely so heavily on attendance, assignments, grades, and credentials as proxies for learning?

That question became Virtu Prep.

Learning isn't attendance. Learning isn't exposure. Learning isn't content consumption. Learning is change in the learner.

If a student can't remember it, explain it, apply it, produce it, and improve through practice, then we shouldn't pretend mastery happened.

I founded Virtu Prep to move education from assumed learning to provable mastery. Virtu Prep is a neuroscience-based, AI-driven learning platform designed to personalize education in real time, integrate biological and behavioral data, and produce measurable evidence of student growth.

Today, Virtu Prep is more than a course platform. It's infrastructure for building schools, academies, training programs, test prep systems, workforce learning environments, and specialized learning institutions.

The broader mission is simple: replace credential gatekeeping with evidence of real ability.

Real Merit Protocol extends that mission as an open-source framework for measuring merit, learner growth, and evidence of ability.

My life's work is about building systems that reveal and develop human capability.