83% of students fail. I found out why — then fixed it.

12 years ago, I was a concert pianist — performing over 70 concerts a year, solo, with orchestra, and as an artist in residence at universities. I wasn't thinking about music education. Then on my final tour, something kept catching my attention. After shows, people would say things like "my nephew took piano for years but quit" or "we could never get our daughter to practice." Everyone had a version of the same story. It struck me as odd — then it started to feel like a pattern.

I built Oclef to answer a question that has quietly ruined the lives of countless children and their families: why do nearly all piano students fail trying to learn piano? And then to do something about it — building a school that achieves a 91% student success rate in an industry where the average is 17%.

After years of researching the problem — first as a software company in Oclef's earliest days, and by taking a job at a typical failing piano school — the answer became clear. The problem wasn't the students. It wasn't even the teachers. It was the model. Weekly lessons create a seven-day gap where bad habits calcify, motivation drifts, and nothing gets corrected in time.

The answer turned out to be daily lessons, not weekly ones. Daily feedback. Daily accountability. A system where students don't drift for seven days between corrections — they improve every single day.

Today Oclef operates across the SF Bay Area, Seattle, and across America — with hundreds of students, a faculty of professors and apprentices, a concert venue (8VA Hall), and a technology platform built to make every lesson smarter than the last.

This site is where I write about what I'm learning: about building companies, about education, about what happens when you take an art form seriously as an engine of human development.