CV

I grew up in Connecticut. I was diagnosed in middle school, after years of testing, with an atypical presentation of dyslexia, and attended seven schools before barely graduating from Staples High School.

I also started a business freelancing as a graphic designer, and fostered a love for challenging games such as Magic the Gathering, Starcraft, and Super Smash Brothers Melee.

I attended McDaniel College, where I studied mathematics lazily for four years. I did not earn a degree during this time. I did however hone my skills at video games quite significantly.

Though little of my time was actually spent in Seoul, my gaming journey did bring me there.

I played SCII quite competently, rising from Gold League at the game's release and to Grandmaster League and top 100 on the global MMR leaderboard. This was during an era of ~14.5 million active monthly players across all regions.

I mained the Terran pieces. Being a maverick who leaned into mech/marco play, I sported unimpressive seasonal TvP win rates (~40%) and more than compensatory TvZ (~60%) and TvT (~90%) win ratios.

After dropping out of college and then putting down SCII, I spent a few months in Peru teaching english. My students, during a heartfelt goodbye, regarded me as a very patient teacher. I won't dismiss the complement, but I think they deserve at least as much credit for patience. My Spanish was worse than their english from the day I arrived to the day I left.

As a tourist in South America I did all the regular stuff, visited Machu Picchu, took harrowing bus rides, walked leashed pumas in the Amazon Jungle.

I found the gig walking pumas during a trip to the Bolivian salt flats. A stranger said his buddy had worked with jaguars. I thought that was amazing! I asked how he'd gotten that job. Answer: "he showed up."

Cut to: I show up unannounced, with 0 training, work with pumas for several weeks, and am predictably injured. But that's a longer story for another time.

I was rejected by Columbia University's School of General Studies in the summer of 2015. I began as a full time student with no qualifications (and more transfer credits than is usually permitted), in the fall of 2015.

According to the dean of admissions at the time, I was one of only two students he was aware of to have ever convinced the school to reverse a rejection.

While at Columbia, where I did earn a BA in Economics, I taught myself to code and spent much of my time solving math problems on websites such as projecteuler.net and brilliant.org's since-sunset community board.

I was hired out of Columbia as a trader at a quant fund. It wasn't for me.

I missed coding, felt like I wasn't building transferrable skills, and I'm not a morning person.

At least I learned my heart was really in coding.

An excellent fellow by the name of David Joerg took a chance on my weird resume, hired me, and mentored me. We built an educational chess app together which was later acquired by chess.com, and I got perhaps the best-fit introduction to software engineering possible as a first step in my software engineering journey.

What started as a side project and helping a friend became my first failed venture (the friendship survived without a hitch)!

Many odd balls in tech, like myself, try to start companies and few get it right their first time. In this way I am not exceptional.

Solvadex's vision was to create a better CMS for engineers who needed to find technical documents by their technical specifications. We had reason to believe that NASA's JPL would value such software. That hypothesis got us as far as meeting with their CTO and demoing on several occasions at JPL with live engineers. I do not recommend attempting to secure enterprise deals with large government agencies to other pre-revenue tech startups.

After having built a few things myself, made meaningful contributions to some projects with genuine users, and watched my mentors carefully for years, I felt ready to try to lead a team. Fortunately small health tech company was happy to sate my ambition and offer me an opportunity to lead a team of what would become four other engineers.

Unfortunately, due to a global health crisis's effect on the economy, that team shrank to one (myself) by the end of my time in that role.

As an adult, who was sufficiently familiar with being in charge of myself, the role no longer felt like a learning opportunity.

Once, in my early twenties, I worked at a Wallgreens for all of about six hours. Working at AWS was the second least interesting job I've ever had. I've learned far more about AWS from doing side projects than I did from actually working at the company. I know and respect many Amazonians, the role I landed just wasn't for me.

I didn't really work at the headquarters, I worked remotely. I'm just trying imbue this position with any spice I can muster.

In my adult life I've used writing as a catharsis. Short stories, poems, jokes, and streams of consciousness, often in the small hours of the night when the last thing my brain needs is an LED array beaming through my ocular nerves.

I hate to be political, but I was not a fan of Jan. 6th 2021. It, plus my disappointment with working at AWS inspired me to write more. I spent the year writing a book. Three rewrites, and 350k words later it remains unpublished. Trust me, you don't want to read it. There was a kernel of an idea. I didn't make it pop.

I learned a ton from the experience, and enjoyed it. I might even write another someday.

I've always loved teaching. I love learning, I love helping people, and I enjoy decomposing complex ideas. Also, I met my wife while teaching a coding class. Fair to say I've found teaching a rewarding pursuit.

Dev Yourself was my attempt at packaging how I think about teaching/learning to code into a website. In service of honing my curriculums, I worked with a few pilot students.

My most geographically distant student was in Zimbabwe during our time working together. His starting point was some code familiarity, his final project was a multilayer perceptron written entirely from scratch, powering an app that accurately predicted the digit that a hand drawn shape on a canvas represented.

To be clear Autojot is ongoing as of me writing this. It just failed to launch in the time I worked on it. No hard feelings about it but I left when I saw writing on the wall.

Autojot's goal is to provide legal experts with a better search tool that finds legal data based on relevant legal concepts at stake, including non-obvious ones. If you're familiar with the industry you know this is where the frontier wants to be.

My contribution: data science, infrastructure, ML, backend, and frontend work amounting to a couple MVPs. On the budget in the time, I mark this as good work, but I don't claim to have budged the frontier at all. Enough to go to market with though? Unknown.

One of my early projects as a hobby developer was a from-scratch genetic algorithm that could learn to write trivial functions from specs. Still it took me until 2026 to have the epiphany humanity is collectively having about AI.

When I had it, I dropped everything and became obsessed with learning how to leverage the absolute most I could from AI. Fig is the result.

Having been a part of two failed ventures already, I know good tech isn't enough. You need to get the tech in people's hands. Fig is probably the best tech I've ever made, so I'm dedicated to getting it in people's hands.