About
I have been a builder all my life. Those who know me 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 to work with many intelligent and fun people.
Founder
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, along with the hi5 brand, grew to over $50M in annual revenue before merging with The Meet Group (NASDQA:MEET) in 2017. Our social graph reached over 300 million people and helped our members develop countless personal relationships.
I spent a decade there, pushing scale and reliability in the face of production realities.
Programmer, then physicist, then computer scientist
Though 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 my final degree is a PhD in computer science, 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: the flows in systems and networking, or the fundamental trade-offs in distributed systems.
Researcher
I returned to university in 2015 and finished a PhD at Berkeley, working on distributed systems and serverless computing. That work is collected on the Research page; the short version is that I spent several years on the question of what it would take for the cloud to behave like one large computer instead of a fleet of many individual machines.
Now
I work at Temporal on the systems foundations that AI applications need in production.
Otherwise
I’m a parent and, when time permits, an athlete who loves running and skiing. I’m also an occasional economics enthusiast, an art collector, and a food connoisseur. At heart I’m an optimist, an explorer, and, of course, a builder.