The long version, in case you’re wondering.
A lot of my childhood was rewiring my parents’ stereo, building and fixing RC cars, and doing dumb things with my family’s Mac IIcx. HyperCard was my first experience with programming, though I didn’t know it was called that. Later I wrote an adventure game on my TI-82.
I studied Symbolic Systems at Stanford, focused on natural language. One summer I interned at Xerox PARC helping create lexicons for grammar-based translation (which we now know is not how it ended up working). Then I went to the MIT Media Lab in the mid-aughts, in John Maeda’s Physical Language Workshop (PLW). Projects included things like an art economy with its own currency where creators could pay each other for work, and a little domain-specific language for procedurally executed contracts that took inputs from the real world. Smart contracts with oracles, basically, except centralized and Ruby.
After that, a series of startups, a highlight of which was card.io, where I was the first hire. The “magic” part was computer vision: point your phone at a credit card and we’d read it. It was a combo of on-device edge detection and de-skewing, plus a backend with two beefy (at the time) GPUs sitting in a San Jose data center rack. I learned a lot about latency and SSL connections, native mobile tricks, and of course the glamorous world of payment integrations. We had some vague aspirations to become a mobile wallet, which back then was the kind of thing that made the big payment networks feel both nervous and excited. Our product worked super well, and our SDK onboarded cards for a bunch of the early mobile apps like Uber. I got to watch that spike from inside. PayPal acquired us in 2012.
That began nearly a decade at PayPal and Braintree, 2012 to 2021. I helped build multiple versions of the mobile SDK, first PayPal’s, which wrapped card.io, then Braintree wrapping PayPal’s. It was mobile SDK inception. I built and led engineering teams across Austin, Chicago, and San Francisco, hired a lot of engineers, ran various initiatives to attract/retain/develop talent by letting smart people actually… do smart things. We shipped things that feel commonplace in payments today and were new at the time: orchestration, tokenization, easy integration SDKs.
With a few execs’ blessings, I also ran an incubation program built on customer-driven discovery, design sprints, and rapid prototyping. The output was strategic recommendations grounded in actual capabilities. A few of those ideas turned into major initiatives.
I learned a lot about management and leadership over that decade. Leadership, at least in my current best guess, seems to be mostly trying to hear people clearly: what they’re thinking, what motivates them, what’s scary or hard, what they care about and why. Then you find ways for that to line up with what the organization needs. Often it does, but not always. It’s a lot harder than it sounds; you see all the hard things people are dealing with, at work but also often in their lives. But it’s meaningful too, because you watch people accomplish hard things, grow and change, have families or adventures, and hopefully go on to even better things.
After PayPal, I spent a few years wandering around in open, decentralized financial systems. The core idea that attracted me was programmatic finance on an open ledger. But what ultimately left me disenchanted was that everything, including the parts that are fascinating or that are driving real innovation, runs on speculation. It’s the fuel. When you try to build useful products on top of it, you discover the demand you thought you had wasn’t actually there. Speculative interest can look like product-market fit at first.
I did a lot of smart contract work: on- and off-ramps between fiat and crypto, onchain DeFi, putting real estate transactions onchain, security reviews, and an early collateralized debt position stablecoin. I also helped a major stablecoin in its early days, building some of the prototypes that showed what was possible and helping the team think through positioning. I did a short tech grant with the Mina Foundation on verifiable credentials with zero-knowledge proofs, then later some strategy work with them on real-world ZK use cases. I spent time with the AO network on Arweave for decentralized computing. All super engrossing stuff. And the people were often great, so international and optimistic, with a surprising kind of humanist purity that I don’t think gets enough credit.