Professional bio

I have been building tech products and teams for 20 years, from early online art economies to consumer electronics to computer vision mobile payments toolkits.

From 2011-2021 I worked in payments at card.io, Braintree, and PayPal. I led engineering in mobile and developer products, emerging commerce patterns, and incubation of forward-looking products.

Throughout my time in payments, my focus has always been on making payments work well for merchants – especially developers – and their customers, in particular on mobile platforms. When you pay for a product or service on the web or in a mobile app, there’s a reasonable chance you’re using code or products I helped make happen.

Back in the 00s, prior to all the payments work, I received my master's degree from the MIT Media Lab, where I was a member of the Physical Language Workshop designing and building tools and platforms for creators. I studied design and completed course and project work in fun topics like signal processing, symbolic programming, sensor networks, and tangible user interfaces. After grad school I led design and frontend at a business intelligence startup, ran a technology lab consultancy, and helped friends with early stage startups.

Before all that, I went to Stanford where I majored in Symbolic Systems. I was very keen on linguistics, the philosophy of langauge, and natural language processing. I had an unforgettable internship in the Xerox PARC Natural Langauge Theory & Technology group with preeminent linguistics researchers, where I wrote a ton of Perl to scrape and cajole dictionary data into English verb lexicons.