Hi. My name is Zach Ware. If I were a cow you would say I’m Oklahoma stock and North Carolina farm-raised.
I split my time between New York, Los Angeles and a small ranch in Red Rock, TX.
You can usually find me searching for good wifi or running away from wifi.
This is what I’m working on /now.
Some things I do:
- CEO of Pilotworks. where we help people build great food businesses.
- Surfer, backcountry explorer, Wilderness First Responder, budding fly fisherman, occasional rock climber, freediver, honorary uncle to five amazing kids.
- Fanatically explore food science and evolutionary biology which started in 2015 when I started focusing on my health in a way that would change everything about how I live and think.
Some things I’ve done, sort of in reverse order:
- Managing Partner of VTF Capital with over 70 investments in companies including Ring, SpaceX, Asana, Mizzen + Main and more.
- Developed the the 4.5 acre, four building Zappos.com LEED Gold HQ in Downtown Las Vegas. (BI)
- Launched Downtown Project in Las Vegas with Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh and a few friends,where I focused on real estate acquisitions, development, government partnerships and major projects. (NY Times, Fortune, Wired)
- Founded Shift, a complex transportation operations and technology company that nearly killed me. I shut it down in 2015. (Washington Post)
- Co-founded Work In Progress (acquired by Let’s Rally).
- Led Product at Zappos.com overseeing product development of the company’s web properties (Zappos.com, Couture, 6pm, Mobile).
- Managed the retail and ecommerce business at The Republic of Tea from San Francisco after several years managing distribution and production from Chicago.
- Managed sales and distribution to restaurants, grocers and food manufacturers in the Southeast US for a DC-based gourmet food importer and distributor.
- Managed our family’s small town restaurant, personally receiving its sizable debts in my parents’ divorce.
- Studied economics and computer science at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN and attended high school at Woodberry Forest School in Virginia, a boarding school to which I applied and was accepted before telling my parents.
- Held lots of random jobs including working at Starbucks, managing a convenience store, being an electrician’s assistant, picking tobacco on my family’s farm and working in a Walmart meat department for two days.
My world view is most heavily influenced by:
- Charlie Munger, specifically The Psychology of Human Misjudgment. I’ve been accused of idol worship.
- The lifetime of works of Ryan Holiday, specifically this, this, this and this.
- Fooled by Randomness and the Incerto works of Nassim Taleb.
- A trio (1, 2, 3) of writings by Tim Urban at Wait But Why.
- I save things in a digital Commonplace book (here’s my Best Of). The rest of what I read and find somewhat interesting is here.
Old Media: