About

Hi, I'm David. I'm excited about helping people find their purpose, build systems for their lives, and make decisions from love instead of fear. I'm a systems thinker, a serial entrepreneur, and I'm obsessed with applying business principles to personal life.

Growing up, I attended 14 different schools. Always the new kid. I was pretty lost and incredibly shy. I dropped out at 15, never got a degree, never had a real job. But I found entrepreneurship, and that gave me direction.

In 2009, I moved from Germany to Los Angeles and co-founded MaxCDN. The business grew, but I was still deeply introverted. Making a phone call felt painful. So I forced myself through exposure therapy: Toastmasters twice a week, two networking events a week, talking to everyone even though it was incredibly uncomfortable. Over time, it worked.

Then a yoga teacher said something that rewired everything: "Every decision in life, you make out of love or out of fear." I started seeing it everywhere. In sales, in leadership, in how I showed up at home. Most of what I thought were rational decisions were actually fear in disguise. This simple idea was so powerful that I started building my life around it.

Around the same time, my mother passed away from cancer and my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. She's fine today. But it shook me. I did the funeral exercise, imagined myself on my deathbed, and asked: did I live a good life? The answer was clear. I wanted more impact. I wanted to find my real purpose.

We had a successful exit with MaxCDN. I started applying the same frameworks I used in business (vision, mission, values, goals, habits) to my personal life. And it worked ridiculously well. I built a portfolio of companies, moved to Bodrum, Turkey with my wife Yurda and our daughter Emma, and built Dunyam Village, a leadership retreat center in Bodrum. We live there with 10 dogs, horses, donkeys, chickens, and ducks. Love Not Fear was always there in the background, but it stayed a side project. I kept getting excited about it, then getting distracted by the next company.

Then my friend Philip McKernan gave me the push I needed. He told me I was like someone who'd loved a girl for 20 years but kept hooking up with her friends. I was too scared to fully commit to Love Not Fear because if it didn't work out, it would feel like I'd failed at life. It was too personal. Once I saw that, I couldn't unsee it.

Today, Love Not Fear is the center of everything I do. I help students figure out what they want to do with their lives, entrepreneurs find alignment, and organizations build culture rooted in purpose. I'm writing a book, building free tools and courses, and I'm excited about using AI to make all of this more accessible. I'm just sharing what I learned along the way.