Why I started Body of Practice

Experience does not equate to wisdom. Experience only becomes useful when you turn it into judgment. I started Body of Practice because writing is the best way I’ve found to do that. It is where I make sense of what ambition and time have taught me, and where I try to turn a life lived across different worlds into something more coherent than a collection of chapters.

Over the last fifteen years, I’ve lived inside a number of demanding environments that do not often get put in conversation with one another. I completed law and business school, worked at one of the most elite corporate law firms in New York, helped build and sustain legal functions inside global investment banks, and then left traditional institutions to join the founding team of a startup. Along the way, I’ve been a first legal hire, scaled a customer success function, worked across legal, operations, strategy, and special projects, and invested in more than fifty startups across fintech, crypto, digital health, consumer, food, real estate, and other sectors.

Some of my deepest lessons did not come from work at all. A life-changing medical malpractice event altered the way I think about time, fragility, and the body. Travel, community, and years of trying to understand health and performance changed the way I think about agency, discipline, and what it means to lead a life well lived. I’ve become less interested in impressive-looking lives and more interested in coherent ones. Less interested in status for its own sake and more interested in whether a person’s values and attention are pointed in the same direction.

My instinct toward building has been there for as long as I can remember. I started my first business at nine, collecting cans for a nickel while biking around the neighbourhood with friends. As a teenager, I co-founded nonprofits and helped raise over $1 million for causes I cared about. In my twenties, I started a media and events business. During the pandemic, I co-founded and later wound down a healthcare employee tech startup. I’ve started, scaled, abandoned, rebuilt, and reimagined enough things to know that building is not just about creating external outcomes. It is also one of the ways I’ve discovered who I am.

What I’ve seen over and over is that the same tensions repeat across domains. I’ve spent enough time moving across disciplines and ways of life to believe that some of the most useful insights come not from staying in one lane, but from learning how to translate between them.

This is my place to think in public about ambition, restraint, risk, reward, identity, and the long game of building a life that reflects what I truly value.

Thanks for being here.

— Martin