Currently a venture partner with Antler VC and also independently angel investing, advising and consulting with technology startups.
See Career + CV for more details about my current and previous work
I’m a technologist, engineering leader and executive, driven by strategy, execution and culture. I’m impassioned by unifying multiple teams of engineers across various domains and driving them towards technical excellence + strong delivery, while being guided by well-defined principles and purpose. Supplementing my extensive technical experience + capabilities, I rely heavily on my personal reverence for multidisciplinary thinking, empathy, psychology, behavioral science and the human elements of large-scale engineering.
I fell in love with technology at a very young age. My mother was a director of computer operations, running a “computer room” filled with early workstations + mainframes (VAX’s, etc). She would often let me join her as she managed both the machines themselves, and her team tasked with operating them. From the moment she let me sit on her lap and program these massive machines with punchcards, I was in love.
In my career as an engineering leader at Uber and Carta, I’ve led Platform and Infrastructure Engineering organizations. I brought together dozens to hundreds of engineers, across multiple teams + suborgs, in highly-collaborative environments, to deliver unified, coherent, holistic solutions for both internal developers and external customers. Bridging the gap not only between the long-term vision of the company and the tangible output of its engineers, but also between the various technical domains within engineering or infrastructure – SRE/reliability, compute, data, developer platform, etc – and empowering all of these individual parts to realize the impact of delivering excellence as a single strategic unit. Executing on this always requires a deep knowledge of organizations + systems, technology, and human behavior – each of which I have a love and affinity for.
In my earlier career, as a software engineer at Facebook and Uber, I focused on both site reliability and capacity engineering at massive scale, ensuring that critical systems, software and products were able to serve millions of users and billions of requests, while doing so in a cost-effective and efficient manner. This included creation of numerous reliability and forecasting/analytical tools, systems and software – including many relying on data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence. At Uber, in both SRE and capacity engineering, I helped to establish both technical domains at the company, as a founding SRE engineer and a key engineer in bringing analytical data + machine learning to capacity engineering.
Given my expertise and experience, I also spend time consulting, advising & angel investing with private startups – along with coaching their executives – as they face challenges related to strategy, business, product, technology, culture and execution.
One of the things which always excites me is the ability to work on multifaceted problems extending across multiple domains and disciplines – what I consider “Whole Chessboard” problems. Solving for the complexity, scope and depth of an entire critical pillar (such as all of engineering, infrastructure, etc) requires both strategic and multidisciplinary thinking, which I find deeply satisfying. I’ve discovered that in leading engineering organizations, there is a myriad of hard problems which can benefit from the application of insights from other fields – psychology + behavioral science, finance + economics, sociology, history, military strategy, foreign policy, etc. The richness of both this broad problem space and the infinite toolbox from which to pull solutions keeps me thoroughly excited and engaged.
I’m at my best in an growth-and-learning-oriented environment, surrounded by other intelligent, driven, engaged people from whom I can constantly learn. In other words, when I can be a “big fish in a [medium-to-]big pond”. I find deep fulfillment, and deliver significant value, when I can provide two things: knowledge for those who are seeking it and questions for those who can answer them. Providing mentorship and guidance are key drivers of my sense of purpose, as is being surrounded by those smarter than me from whom I can learn.
I currently live in Downtown Austin, TX and spend much of my personal time on fitness (gymnastics, swimming, yoga, bicycling), travel, investing, collecting art, and meditation.