Welcome to my corner of the internet.

what i've been up to

How I got here.

Growing up

I grew up in Vancouver, WA (not the one in Canada, but the smaller one just north of Portland, OR). As a kid, I loved movies, but not particularly watching them. I was more fascinated by the behind-the-scenes production that brings a film to life. I also grew up with YouTube, so naturally, I wanted to be a YouTuber. I started a channel with a friend and we made everything from tutorials to comedy sketches. Editing those videos on my family's old laptop became the part I looked forward to most. I eventually taught myself Adobe Creative Suite and fell in love with making things that made people laugh.

High school

In high school, I started my first “business” designing and selling t-shirts with our AP Bio teacher's face on them. We put flyers everywhere, especially above urinals (prime ad space). We got a bunch of pre-orders, but the iron-on designs fell apart horribly after one wash. We pivoted to stickers instead. But this experience of building something that people were genuinely excited about made me want to keep creating.

When COVID hit, I created a board game called The Bear Game to help bring families to spend more time together. I teamed up with some childhood friends, and designed our first prototype on index cards. Over the next two years, I learned how to cold call retailers, manage manufacturing, and just how much I loved seeing people enjoy using something I designed. Eventually, we got the game into 16 retailers and hundreds of homes. As our priorities shifted to college, we decided to sell our company to Quokka, a children's toy company.

College

I studied Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington. Early on, I discovered and fell in love with the potential of software. I spent a year building a mobile app called Mezzo to make social meetups easier. We had some really cool ideas, but learned firsthand how hard social coordination problems are. More importantly, it got me hooked on designing software.

While working on this, I reached out to and interned at Pogo to learn more about consumer mobile apps and startups. After nearly a year, I wanted to see what designing at scale looked like so I joined Slack and worked on their automation platform, Workflow Builder. I was also a part of the Kleiner Perkins Fellowship that summer. This experience showed me the value of craft and delight, how different that was from the startup pace I was used to.

Throughout college, I wanted to explore companies of all sizes. During the following school year, I worked part-time at two early-stage startups. At Whalesync, I helped design for their pivot into automation for enterprises. At CrowdVolt, I joined right as they entered YC and designed the first version of a bid/ask marketplace for concert tickets.

The summer after my junior year, I joined Figma on the Billing Monetization team and helped with their redesign of the admin console and new billing model. Afterwards, I took a gap quarter from school to work at Glean, to experience designing AI and a growth stage startup. These experiences gave me a deeper appreciation for product strategy and the many tradeoffs behind every decision.

Outside of internships, I kept building. A friend and I  realized the catering process was outdated (long forms, emailed PDFs, and multi-day waits). So we built Napkin, a faster way to book catering, now used by a handful of Seattle restaurants. Later, we built MatchPaintColor, a mobile app to find the unknown paint colors of your wall.  We launched it and spent an entire afternoon filming TikToks (which all flopped). Eventually, we started generating AI influencer videos to promote our app. One of them went viral and shot our app to the top of the charts. That internal tool became its own product and we called it ReelClone.

What I do today

Today, I'm  based in San Francisco and back at Pogo, leading design and helping people earn and save money from their data (a full-circle moment that still surprises me). Outside of work, I'm always experimenting with new product ideas, lately exploring AI in mobile apps.

At the core of it all, I love building things that make people smile and bring moments of delight.