Where I've been
I've spent 20+ years building products and engineering teams across ecommerce, social networking, and health tech. I built new products inside a Fortune 5 startup incubator, then did it again as the founding technology leader at BetterUp from inception to 140+ person org with hundreds of millions in revenue.
I've learned a lot along the way, and have a whole lot more learning yet to do.
How I work
A few convictions guide how I build and lead:
- Solving customer problems is the goal. Writing code is occasionally the solution.
- Teams are the unit of performance. Great teams build great products, and great products build great companies. Heroes don't scale. Durable teams that own their work do.
- Ship fast, learn faster. We're usually wrong about what customers need, so the sooner real work reaches them, the sooner we learn what's worth building.
- Quality is a feature. Every resilient platform is built on well-composed subsystems. The best become antifragile, where pressure actually makes them stronger.
- Great culture is built, not declared. Peak performance only happens in an environment built intentionally. Make the right thing the easy thing, make great work visible, and it spirals up from there.
- Maker mentality. Rolling up my sleeves is still part of the job, and always will be.
What I'm thinking about
I use writing as a tool to clarify my own thinking. My recent focus has been on leadership, product development, and building engineering teams in the age of AI. Here are a few that I keep coming back to:
What I'm shipping
I've been shipping for decades, and I'm still at it. From AI, to web applications, to infrastructure libraries, to browser extensions, and productivity tools. Much of my work is open-source, and some highlights include:
- multitenant - preventing cross-tenant data leaks
- backgrounded - async background processing for Ruby
- gitx - Git eXtensions for improved workflows