Get close
The useful product gap usually appears after living with the system, the user, and the ugly edge cases.
The part that isn’t on LinkedIn
None of this was the plan.
I have no fucking clue what I’m doing. I’ve just gotten comfortable moving before the whole path makes sense.
I’m from the north suburbs of Chicago. Building things with computers did not feel like a creative life that was available to me. I left an early job to chase an ICO. It failed. I ran out of money and fell into technical recruiting because I would take any job.
I kept moving while I figured it out: Chicago to Arizona and a nomadic stretch, back to Chicago, then New York, and now San Francisco. In between there was time in places like Barcelona, Mexico City, Paris, and elsewhere. I’m new here again—which feels pretty consistent with the rest of the story.
Recruiting became an accidental education—from Rails startups to high-frequency trading and distributed systems—then a route into ConsenSys and the Ethereum ecosystem. Peeple Work gave me enough independence to recruit for a living and build products everywhere else.
Software became the biggest public stage I could afford. An idea can become an experience, travel without me, and reach anyone with an internet connection. It does not have to save the world. Making one corner of it three percent better is enough reason to keep going.