In December of 2022, I was supposed to be starting dental school. Six years into a biochemistry degree, near the top of my class, and every letter came back a waitlist. The waiting was quietly breaking me, so I went back to what has always cleared my head: snowboarding, my meditation since I was a kid.

I started making wax to fill the time between runs, mixing batches in our kitchen at night and testing them by morning. A few weeks in, it clicked. The degree I was ready to abandon applied to every part of a wax formula, and the more I dug, the uglier the industry looked. Most ski wax is paraffin, a petroleum byproduct that wears off your base and into the water we drink. Right as that sank in, Park City banned PFAS in wax, and I finally knew what I wanted to build.

Getting there has not been easy. Our first wax night with the University of Utah's One Love ski club went so badly we thought the idea was dead, but it taught us the rule that made us: scrape clean, perform well, no exceptions. Not long after, Jason from Ski N See spotted our first packaged bar in a bowling alley and took a chance on us before anyone else would.

None of it would exist without my wife, Kas, the true original co-founder, who now runs a small shave ice shack while we raise our two kids. Board Budder rides as fast as paraffin or faster, fully biodegradable, with none of the junk left behind. No suits, no shortcuts, just riders proving clean can outride dirty. Let's build it right, ride it hard, and Shred Responsibly.