Principal-led advisory · Portland, Oregon
I see it before it becomes obvious—and help leaders act on what it reveals.
Evidence before explanation
I work where established categories stop being useful—across technology, policy, economic development, institutional design, capital, and community. The common work is seeing the whole and moving it.
01 · State policy
As chair of Oregon’s Governor’s Small Business Advisory Council, I helped determine what reached the Governor, what received support, and what moved toward the Legislature.
My part · interpretation, priority-setting, policy translation
02 · Regional systems
As vice president of the Greater Portland Economic Development District and co-chair of the Metro Regional Innovation Hub, I work across public, private, workforce, education, and community interests at regional scale, and earlier on federal place-based strategy through the U.S. Census Bureau’s Opportunity Project.
My part · strategic architecture, institutional alignment, viable pathways
03 · Founders + capital
More than twenty years as an angel investor, advisor, and startup mentor—alongside building pathways into coaching, networks, institutions, and capital.
My part · venture judgment, pattern recognition, introductions
04 · Civic technology
Founded and led efforts in civic technology and inclusive innovation, including the International CivTech Alliance through the Civic Software Foundation, joining government, business, philanthropy, technologists, and communities around shared work.
My part · coalition design, shared governance, institutional formation
The reading
What looks like several different problems is often one pattern expressing itself in several places.
The architecture
Rules, governance, capital, incentives, workflows, institutions, and the pathways through which authority and resources actually move.
The living pattern
Motives, relationships, identity, culture, informal power, reflexive behavior, and the unspoken agreements shaping what people can do together.
The trajectory
The history a system carries, the story it tells about itself, the future it can imagine, and what its choices are making possible.
A framework without a constituency stays on paper. A coalition without structure dissolves. A strategy without meaning is abandoned. The leverage is in the relationship among them.
The method
I stay accountable for the whole while the right operators, specialists, and institutions lead the work within it. Research may use many tools and models. The reading, judgment, and direction remain mine.
Read beyond the stated problem: where energy pools, where it drains, what repeats, and what everyone routes around.
Distinguish noise from signal. Name the constraint, the generative tension, and the shape beginning to emerge.
Give the insight form: a strategy, governance model, coalition, pilot, pipeline, or institution others can build.
Hold the throughline as the design meets reality. Learn from the answer, adjust, and begin the next turn.
Done well, the result feels inevitable once it exists.
Ways to engage
If all you want to do is think and talk about the future, I am not the one. The work begins with understanding and ends with a changed decision, design, relationship, or trajectory.
Map the system, identify the actual constraint, and determine what must exist next.
Design the strategy, governance, coalition, funding structure, pilot, or institution the diagnosis calls for.
Keep the strategic throughline intact while leaders, institutions, and operators carry the work.
The principal
Dwayne Johnson · Founder, Globe Three Ventures
My perspective is polymathic: many disciplines, scales, and kinds of information held concurrently—not flattened into one vocabulary, but translated toward their underlying structure.
I draw from technology, business, finance, history, psychology, mathematics, science, anthropology, culture, ecology, spirituality, and human systems. The point is not breadth for its own sake. It is the ability to enter another perspective, preserve what matters inside it, and see the relationships that become visible only across domains.
I have spent more than thirty years building ventures, coalitions, organizations, and economic systems across business, government, technology, philanthropy, and community. I am president of the Oregon Innovation Foundation, vice president of the Greater Portland Economic Development District, and co-chair of the Metro Regional Innovation Hub. I work as a constitutional architect: designing the rules by which institutions decide and coalitions cohere. I am a founding ambassador for Right to Start and a founder of the International CivTech Alliance through the Civic Software Foundation, and I have served on Oregon’s STEM Investment and Talent Council and its Committee for Performance Excellence. I previously chaired Oregon’s Governor’s Small Business Advisory Council.
For more than twenty years I have invested in and advised startups. Earlier chapters in corporate development, mergers and acquisitions, and investment gave me a reader’s eye for a deal, a market, and a balance sheet; I no longer offer that work, but the literacy remains. I have also made more than 1,000 Kiva loans to entrepreneurs worldwide, out of a conviction that capacity is everywhere and access is not.
I hold an MBA in Entrepreneurship, summa cum laude, from Babson College and a BA in Far East History from Cal Poly Pomona. One trained me to build ventures. The other trained me to read civilizations. Both taught me that institutions are structures made from human choices.
Full background on LinkedIn ↗A useful tension
A consequential problem?
Tell me what feels stuck, what keeps recurring, or what you sense is emerging before you can name it.
An interesting problem is sometimes enough. Even if we don’t work together, I may see something useful and share it.