I have been a builder all my life. Those who know me well know I'm often happiest when assembling or creating. Over the years, I've been lucky to gain access to bigger and better toys and tools and work with many smart and fun people.

As an entrepreneur, I'm most proud of if(we), the company I co-founded with my long-time friend Greg Tseng. Being part of the birth of social networking was a huge thrill, as was building a business; Tagged was the first social network to become profitable and grew to over $50M in annual revenue. After merging with hi5 we created a social graph counting over 300 million people and helped our members develop countless personal relationships.

While I was interested in computers early on and learned FOR loops before basic English grammar, my focus shifted to physics and mathematics as my academic training accelerated. Physics was my focus for over a decade: through high school, college, and graduate school. I appreciated the way of thinking that physics teaches, and I thoroughly enjoyed learning from some of the world's best experimentalists and theorists. Physics came to define my identity—and still forms a part of it.

Now that I have my highest degree in computer science, a PhD, I have reactivated part of my old identity—I am undoubtedly a computer scientist.

Still, the computer science problems that appeal to me most are those with a physics flavor, for example, the flows in systems and networking or the fundamental trade-offs in distributed systems.

Today I'm a lot of things, a little of everything in my past, plus my passion for the future. I'm a parent and, when time permits, an athlete who loves to run, row, or ski. I'm also an economics enthusiast, an art collector, and a food connoisseur. At heart, I'm an optimist, an explorer, and yes, a builder.