About me

A builder, engineer, and storyteller.

I like hard problems, the kind that keep me up at night. The itch I'm trying to scratch is whether software can remove friction between people, not just between people and machines. Now, with the emergence of LLMs and agents, I keep asking myself: if machines can talk to other machines, what will people finally be free to do?

I care about making software easier to build, test, and ship. Automation is my mantra: if a task is boring and repetitive, a computer should be doing it. It makes fewer mistakes than I do, and it never complains.

The Journey

My path hasn't been a straight line. It’s been defined by high stakes, hard lessons, and a relentless drive to build.

I co-founded Figment, a studio and technology company built around a kind of media that couldn't exist before AI: stories that adapt in real time, turning into personalized, interactive, infinite worlds.

We built two things. One was a social-first platform for these stories, where the best ones could be adapted into higher and higher fidelity media. The other was a set of professional-grade AI tools for visuals and narrative. The tools felt like toys, so making a story was fun and approachable.

The founding team came from Pixar and Epic Games, and combined deep AI and gaming expertise with creative talent. We raised money from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) through their Speedrun program, SR004. I put everything into it.

It didn't work out. Looking back, three things went wrong. We were unfocused; we wanted to do everything. We didn't treat our ideas as hypotheses and test them. And we didn't want to pivot, because we'd never built a culture of experimentation.

Now I want to join a company with real momentum, and bring those three lessons with me as an engineer and a founder.

Before the venture world, I spent three years as a Senior Software Engineer at Pixar Animation Studios. I helped build the technology behind five animated feature films. I also introduced AI-powered asset search into the studio's production pipeline.

Before Pixar, I spent nearly a decade at Pearson Education. That's where I built the foundation of my engineering career. As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer, I designed fault-tolerant cloud systems, introduced microservices, and led a team of five.

That interest in automation carried over into open source. I built tools like tfswitch to make engineers' workflows simpler.

I do my best work on small teams of smart, motivated people, and I believe good code should talk to the next person, not just the machine.

During my free time, I play the violin, take photographs, go hiking with my dog, and fly a Cessna 172 around the bay. Recently, I've been learning to sail at the Cal Berkeley Sailing Club. I collect hobbies the way other people collect browser tabs.