I am a designer and engineering leader from Austin Texas. I sit at the intersection design research and agile development, rapidly testing new features, and then planning for scaling them with distributed systems.
Therefore, I like to think of myself as a full stack technologist.
I’ve founded a few startups, and I’ve consulted with even more; most recently I have spent the past two years working at goPuff to help them build core SCM and Fulfillment technologies that enabled their logistics network to scale from dozens of facilities during early rounds of funding to hundreds of facilities and multiple acquisitions, resulting in billions of dollars raised by the Co-CEOs, securing us an even steeper valuation.
I’ve been in R&D for 7 years now, wether I’ve been coding, editing mockups, managing products, testing, hiring talent, running scrums, growing teams. Every project I take on represents an opportunity to learn and grow and make. I am excited by the community of interesting people around me, and what we can create together. Come, be a part of that journey!
My Journey
2014 – In Deep Shit 💩
Literally. I was at brick-bottom. Over a year of toiling in uni studying civil engineering and all I had to show for it was a shitty internship – wading in the sewers to install velocity sensors below the city. Around the same time I lost contact with all of the closest people to met and became isolated.
2014 – Hundreds of Sleepless nights 🛏️😫
Over the next six months I worked 12 hour days with a two hour commute, only to come home and teach myself programming and design. I studied out of two coffee shops until closing time. Then I would move to my university’s main building to continue working until I started nodding off. Sleep 3 hours. Repeat.
When I could stay awake on the train, the commute time also afforded me time to read tons of books on startups, psychology, and productivity. Many days I sorely needed the rest instead.
2015– Starting Up 👩🔬📲
Half a year later and three program changes later I finally found myself studying and interning in software formally at uni. I worked in a collaborative and interdisciplinary space at Drexel where I was able to apply what I had taught myself and develop mobile apps, manage projects with clients, create learning material, and run events.
Oh, and I met the cofounders of my first start up too. He just happened to walk into the wrong building while I was sitting in the lobby on my laptop.
Moonlighting a startup that year taught me more than anything else I had ever done – continuing the habit of accelerating my learning constantly. Unfortunately, it was a painful messy process with lots of disagreement, disorganization, and of course, some wandering around with our heads off. We got really close as a team and somehow managed to get a product built despite knowing all the wrong things.
2017– Building Out 🌆📈
After a series of struggles pitching and marketing our app. I decided to call it quits — shortly before the rest of the team followed suit. I started seriously consulting and also joined another venture, LawDecoder, as an interim head of product and tech while they searched for a permanent technical cofounder. Turns out there are a lot of startups in a similar boat as them — enough for me to make a scaleable consulting practice out of the skill’s I’d learned.
And by the time that LawDecoder’s core tech got acquired, a year and a half later, we never did secure my replacement. So I left right before the company shut down.
2019 – Shutting Down 😴🌱
After 3 years, 8 companies, and a couple large contracts with angel backed clients, I found myself still juggling the startup role and my consulting work. I had badly burnt myself out, so I decided I had to leave the company and stop taking on work, maybe for a few weeks.
A few months later, still barely recovered from burnout, I started drumming up consulting work again. Before I got very far, I also noticed an acquaintance whom I had met at a JS meetup in the city, reaching out to me about joining the team of an incredibly fast growing, soon to be unicorn headquartered a few blocks from where I lived at the time.
Despite trying to aggressively disqualify the opportunity when we met for coffee, it turned out that against all odds the company — goPuff — was actually a great fit. Two weeks later I found myself heading up the discovery and development of several foundational pieces of their emerging logistics platform. And I’ve been growing the teams in that vertical ever since.
Work with Me 😸
If my work or journey interests you or if you just want to say ‘hi’, let me know what kind of cool stuff you are working on. I’d love to hear about it and figure out how I might be able to help push it further.
These day’s I’m particularly interested in logistics, SCM, ERP, e-commerce, blockchain, and operations research and innovation.