About

Private investor. Entrepreneur. Overtrained hybrid athlete. Aspiring river guide. Certified freediver. Try to read a lot.

Through Freehouse Partners, developing commercial real estate in mid-sized markets of the upper Rockies. Split time between Austin, Northwest Montana, and occasionally New York.

References available upon request.

You can email me at zw at zgware dot com or DM me on Twitter.

I write my friends occasionally to share what I’ve been up to. Get it here:

Now

Freehouse Partners – real estate development and growth investments across the Intermountain West and Industrial Heartland
Co-owner of Apres Whitefish
Occasional startup investor
Wakesurfer, skier, hunter
Health, longevity, and biology nerd

Before That

I co-founded the Downtown Project alongside Tony Hsieh – a $350M, 41-acre urban redevelopment in Las Vegas. I led real estate development and government partnerships. It got some attention: NY Times, Fortune, Wired. Here’s a walking interview I did about it and a talk I gave at Google (I was painfully hungover).

Before that I led product at Zappos and developed their LEED Gold HQ in Downtown Las Vegas.

Some other things along the way:

VTF Capital – ~$85M seed-stage venture fund. Investments include SpaceX, Mizzen + Main, Stedi, Zipline, Ring, and Asana
Shift – transportation startup in partnership with Tesla (Washington Post). We shut it down in 2015.
Work In Progress – multi-unit coworking company, later acquired by Let’s Rally
Pilotworks – turnaround CEO of a shared commercial kitchen operator across six states
The Republic of Tea – led retail and ecommerce
A DC-based gourmet food importer – led sales and distribution in the Southeast

Way Before That

Grew up on a farm in North Carolina. Economics and computer science at Vanderbilt. Worked at Starbucks, managed a convenience store, was an electrician’s assistant, picked tobacco on my family’s farm, and lasted two days in a Walmart meat department.