About

I’m a software engineer turned engineering leader, with over 20 years of experience building products, companies, and engineering teams. I’ve worked across startups and large technology companies, consumer and enterprise software, and quite a few different technical domains. Machine learning has been a recurring theme throughout my career, long before the current AI boom.

I got my start with computers in the nineties, writing Pascal and C++ on an old Macintosh. I went on to study AI and machine learning in undergrad and grad school, during an AI winter, including a bachelor’s thesis on recurrent neural networks.

I started my professional career at Google, working on search ranking, infrastructure, and large-scale machine learning systems. I later moved to YouTube, where I developed some of the first algorithms behind personalized homepage recommendations and went on to build and lead the recommendation and personalization teams. We worked closely with Google Research to bring new ML methods into production, published several papers and patents, and received a Technology & Engineering Emmy for our work.

After Google, I co-founded Rep, a messaging-based customer service startup backed by Accel and First Round, among others. We built products for brands including M.Gemi, M.M.LaFleur, and Timbuk2, and were eventually acquired by Stripe in 2018.

I then joined Branch as CTO, helping build a mobile-first financial services business operating in India, Kenya, and Nigeria. One of the more interesting challenges was building a distributed product and engineering organization across the US, India, and Nigeria, while moving more of the company’s leadership closer to the markets we served.

At Figma, I led engineering for FigJam, Figma Slides, and several new product initiatives. We grew FigJam from pre-revenue to close to $100M in annual recurring revenue, built out a team of around 80 engineers, and launched everything from AI-powered features to washi tape, arguably just as important. I also helped launch Figma Slides and kicked off the work that eventually became Figma Buzz.

Most recently, I was VP of Engineering at Harvey, where I led Product & AI Engineering, Infrastructure, Security, and Applied Research through a period of rapid growth. We grew the engineering organization from roughly 40 to 160 people, launched new AI agents and workflow-building capabilities, and scaled the underlying systems to support a rapidly growing customer base. An intense and interesting couple of years.

These days, I’m an advisor, investor, and builder. I work hands-on with early-stage founders and engineering leaders on product, AI, technical strategy, and scaling organizations, including through my work as an Executive in Residence at Scale Venture Partners. I’m also building and experimenting with projects of my own across AI-powered software, photography, and robotics. I’m particularly interested in the challenge of turning promising technology into products that people actually use.

Outside of work, I spend time with my wife and three sons, run, cycle, play tennis, experiment in the kitchen, and occasionally find time for photography and writing. Still enjoy writing code, too.