Why VaultXL exists

VaultXL didn't start with a business plan. It started with a storage unit.

To explain how I ended up paying a thousand dollars a month on one for five years, I have to go back further than that.

For the first part of my life, basketball was the whole thing. The recruiting services had me ranked ahead of a kid I'd been playing with and against since high school — Stephen Curry, who ended up at Davidson with one Division I offer because nobody else wanted him. I had several. I signed with UNC Charlotte: eight NCAA tournaments in eleven years at that point, and close enough that my parents could come to games.

Rankings are worth what you'd guess. My college career didn't go the way it was supposed to. I still got to play professionally overseas, which was the dream, and my parents got to tell people their son played pro basketball. Then, in my mid-twenties, it was over.

I had a marketing degree from business school, but while my classmates were doing the internships that turn into jobs, I was in a gym. They were three years up the ladder by the time I came home, and nobody was in a hurry to hire a former basketball player with no work history.

So I went back to something my father and I had started in 1999, when we opened an eBay account together. He sold; I became obsessed with the buying side. Mostly sneakers — Jordans and Air Maxes that never made it to Charlotte shelves — and eventually I noticed that the shoes I was buying at retail were worth real money to somebody in another state.

I started selling. Then I sold more. That became a footwear business, and the footwear business became a career: e-commerce for other companies, a stretch with the Carolina Panthers' official team store, then e-commerce manager for a German manufacturer with U.S. offices.

By 2020 I was making more money in e-commerce than I ever had. I was married. We were expecting our son. And the world outside was coming apart while my parents were getting older — my mother fighting cancer in Charlotte, my father increasingly alone in Vermont.

In January 2021 my father called me from Vermont. His car had broken down, he was out of food, and there were two feet of snow outside his door. I booked a flight for the next morning.

I was the only passenger on the plane to Burlington. That isn't a figure of speech — one person, one flight. I was supposed to quarantine for seven days when I landed. I drove straight to my father's house instead.

He was still himself: sharp, funny, mid-argument about something he'd been reading. But his skin had gone yellow and he could barely stand. I brought in food. I brought vitamins. I asked him to see a doctor and he said no, and I asked again for two days until he said yes.

I drove him to the hospital and checked him in. They would not let me past the front door. That was the last time I saw my father. He got a message to me that he loved me dearly but didn't want to talk. I understood. He died on January 6.

I was an only child, and my parents were two of my closest friends. I couldn't call him about the baby. I couldn't ask a parenting question, or argue about football, or hear whatever strange corner of history he'd gotten into that week.

My mother tried to hold me together. She and my father had been divorced for years and still spoke every single day, so she was grieving him too — while her breast cancer moved into her bones and standing up became painful.

She refused chemo. She took the other treatment until she decided it wasn't helping, and then she stopped. Five months after my father died she couldn't keep food down. The hospital said she was too weak for anything major. She went into hospice and died two days later.

Inside of six months, both of the people who had been there for everything were gone. I had a four-month-old, a wife, a full-time job and my own business. Life doesn't offer you the option to stop.

Nobody prepares you for this part.

My father never cared much about possessions. He was a writer — an editor at the Miami Herald in his twenties, a screenwriter in Los Angeles, an Emmy winner for the documentary Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam, and at the end of his life the author of a book called The Ancient Giants Who Ruled America. What he left me was paper. Manuscripts, research, notes, rights. After he died I read more of his work than I ever had while he was alive, and I realized it could outlast both of us.

My mother's estate was the opposite. A life of accumulated things, some of it passed down from her own mother. Some valuable. Some only sentimental. Some I couldn't identify at all.

Here's the part I still think about. By then I had sold well over a million dollars of other people's things online. I can price a pair of Jordans within five dollars from a phone photo. And I could not tell you what my mother's living room was worth, or what to sell first, or what a fair commission looked like, or which pieces to hold back for my son.

Expertise wasn't what I was missing. Capacity was. Grief takes the exact part of your brain that settling an estate requires — the part that makes decisions, sequences work, and tolerates being told no.

I quit my job to make time for it. I still couldn't do it.

So I did what millions of people do. I rented a storage unit, put all of it inside, and closed the door. A year passed. Then another. Then another. Nothing was solved. I was paying a thousand dollars a month to postpone a decision.

Five years of that is sixty thousand dollars. I could price a pair of Jordans within five dollars from a photo, and I spent the cost of a car to avoid pricing my own mother's living room — while the paper and textiles and finishes inside sat through five years of climate swings, and the markets moved without me.

That unit wasn't a death problem. It was a transition problem.

The same locked door shows up when parents downsize after forty years in a house, when someone moves into assisted living, when a marriage ends and a household has to be split, when a job moves a family across the country, when an estate sale closes and hundreds of good items are still sitting on tables. Every one of those moments already carries enough weight. The belongings shouldn't be the part that breaks you.

And what people need in those moments isn't more storage. Storage is how the problem gets deferred. What they need is a system: everything inventoried and photographed, each category researched against what it actually sells for, and every piece routed to the channel that pays the most for it — our own storefront, eBay, Etsy, or a local buyer who comes and collects — instead of one buyer taking the whole house at one price because that's the easy call.

That became VaultXL. We combine e-commerce, software and physical logistics to organize, value, store and sell belongings during major transitions. You get a written inventory, real numbers, and a plan before anything moves, and nothing is sold without your sign-off.

The walkthrough is free. After it, you get a written quote before any work starts: a setup fee set for your project, and a 15% commission on what we sell for you, taken from the sale price after sales tax and marketplace fees, so you keep 85%. Clearing, sorting and packing are quoted the same way, after we have seen the house. How long yours takes depends on the house, and I'd rather give you a real date at the walkthrough than a number I can't stand behind. What I can show you is every completed sale, priced and dated, at vaultxl.com/sold.

Something I didn't expect has happened while building this. It has helped me too. Every house we work through is a version of the one I couldn't face in 2021, and getting somebody else to the other side of it has done more for me than the years I spent not opening that door.

My father's writing I'm not selling at all. That stays, and my 2 sons will read it.

I couldn't build VaultXL in time to solve my own problem. I can build it for the next person.

Help people move forward without leaving everything behind.