Starting a new business is a mix of emotions. Fear, endorphins, anxiety, and excitement all wrapped into the tip of an arrow, trying to hit a moving target. After over ten years telling stories for brands, I had a story inside myself that I had to see come to life, my own.

Golden Age started taking shape on April 26th, 2014. Putting it at exactly 1,911 days before we opened our doors. The reason I remember this date so well is that on April 26th, we premiered A Film About Coffee, my first feature-length documentary, about the specialty coffee industry. That night we had a wine from a winery called Bow & Arrow and it was a Gamay that was produced in a ‘natural’ way. Everyone at the table loved the dinner, the drinks, and most of all that we had actually finished making a film which is no small feat. But for me, the wine resonated in a way that sent me looking for other similar wines, turning my gaze from coffee to a new beverage. In a very similar way to how coffee grabbed a hold of something deep inside of me, wine now had its hooks in me. I was determined to find out why this wine was so different from anything else I had experienced. The kernel of discovery for ​A Film About Coffee​ was a naturally processed coffee from Blue Bottle that sent me on a journey to discover the origin of its taste, and ultimately a desire to tell the story of a burgeoning new sector of the coffee world. With coffee, it was a film and with wine, it was a “move across the country and open a brick-and-mortar wine shop” kind of response.

What I didn’t realize until we started the process of opening, was that it was a somewhat rare occurrence to have both a retail wine shop ​and​ wine bar. I’ve visited so many throughout San Francisco and around the globe on production, I had just assumed that most places could offer ‘off-premise’ and ‘on-premise’ wine sales—but that’s not the case. Even New York City won’t let you have both in the same space!

Remember the whole ‘starting a business is hard’ talk from the beginning? Well it was. And uniquely, for someone working as a Director, one of the challenges was actually taking the time to get the business off the ground and consequently saying no to client work in order to make it happen. During my second attempt to get the business off the ground, I was thwarted by a seven footer named Kevin Durant. I was tapped to make a documentary in partnership with Nike chronicling Durant’s run up to win a championship. Since the idea was already brewing in my head, we decided to pick some fun wines for him at a screening in the Avos studio, which concluded with him asking if I was a, “Sommelier or some kind of shit.” Making that film was a dream, and it unlocked something inside me that pushed me to go after a new dream.

Charting new waters by managing a construction site and designing a hospitality experience with my partner Trent was at times comical. However, those times on set making tough decisions somehow prepared me for all of the different obstacles that would come our way at Golden Age. That is part of what I love about Golden Age; there is something new every day that pushes me to grow in new ways.