Taylor was a college athlete. He played football at the University of Wisconsin — part of a Rose Bowl championship team. He also competed in track and field, throwing shot put at both Wisconsin and Illinois. Athletics wasn't just something he did. It was how he was wired.
Then he got injured. The career ended before he was ready. And for the first time, the competitive structure that had defined his life — the team, the scoreboard, the season, the coach — was gone.
What he found next changed everything. A student-led painting organization. It shouldn't have made sense. But it did — immediately. The recruiting, the training, the territory, the performance metrics. It had all the bones of what he'd left behind on the field, just applied to something real. This became his new sport.
He was relentless. He rose to the top of every team he was a part of. By the time he graduated, he wasn't ready to leave — he bought the Illinois market and built from there.
Over the next decade he launched and managed operations across the country and beyond — eventually overseeing more than 50,000 homes painted across 20 states and 2 countries.
In 2020 he stepped away. Headed south. And started watching.
Injury
One
The South is one of the fastest-growing residential markets in the country. And this model — student-led, professionally backed, rigorous in its recruiting and training — simply doesn't exist here. That gap is the opportunity.
But there was a second reason. Taylor watched his own children approach college age. He saw the options available to driven young people who weren't going to play college sports — the internships that taught nothing, the summer jobs that went nowhere, the absence of any real competitive arena to develop in.
And then he thought about the people he had worked with over the years. The ones who came through this program and went on to build extraordinary things — companies, careers, legacies. An ER physician now heading an entire emergency medicine department. The founder behind WallStreetBets — the most influential investing community in internet history. Entrepreneurs who raised tens of millions. CEOs. Partners. Leaders in every field imaginable.
Without this program, many of those paths likely never happen. The skills, the confidence, the competitive hunger that gets activated when a 20-year-old runs a real business for the first time — that's not something you get from a desk job or a shadowing internship. Taylor saw it over and over. And he realized this mattered to far more people than just him.
VRSTY is built to be that arena. For every student who still has the drive but doesn't have the field to play on anymore. For every homeowner who deserves a crew that shows up, communicates honestly, and delivers results.
It's a painting company. And it's a lot more than that.
VRSTY is just getting started. The best time to get in is now.