Hello! Welcome to my little corner on the internet. I'm a cancer survivor. I love music and audio equipment. If I'm reading fiction, it's going to be some flavor of science-fiction. I've been infatuated with technology and computers since I was 12, and I spend my time these days at Square. I'm married to the wonderful KJ. Here are some articles that I love.
AI doesn't just make teams faster, it makes every wrong turn more expensive and every gap in collaboration more visible.
Most conversations about first principles focus on the how, but the real question is why it matters and how diverse mental models turn foundational thinking into lasting innovation.
The SLS rocket's $17 billion failure wasn't a technical problem but an organizational one, and the same solution-first thinking and sunk-cost traps show up in product teams everywhere.
You can debug motivation the same way you debug code, by setting breakpoints around autonomy, mastery, and purpose to find what's actually stuck.
Great ideas rarely arrive at the right moment, and the best ones often need decades of compounding progress before the world is ready for them.
A framework for evaluating whether your team's processes are actually serving outcomes or just becoming habits nobody questions.
A look at two mental models for deciding when to ship small and fast versus when to invest in something bigger.
A running catalog of every sci-fi book I've read, organized by author and series.
What firefighters can teach product teams about caring for the tools they build.
How successful app interactions eventually become commodities baked into the OS, and why that cycle actually pushes the App Store toward faster innovation.
What Bay Area redwood groves and their fire-dependent fairy-rings taught me about why re-orgs, though painful, can reset the conditions for growth inside large companies.
A case for paying writers directly, and how ad-driven content shapes not just what we read but how we think.
Hierarchy works best when leaders support from below, teaching organizations to dream rather than dictating from above.
A practical collection of one-on-one questions organized by category to keep your meetings from going stale and help managers and reports have better conversations.
I wonder" might be the simplest phrase that changes everything about how you see the world.
A framework built around four principles that help people feel motivated at work, from relationships and growth to autonomy and meaning.
Choosing your training set is the AI equivalent of writing your tests first, and the analogy between Software 1.0 and 2.0 runs deeper than you'd expect.
A personal account of being diagnosed with Stage IIIa testicular cancer, going through chemo while running a startup, and reaching the five-year remission mark.
Amazon's warehouse wristbands aren't about squeezing workers, they're about collecting motion data to train the robots that will replace them.
Raw notes and reflections from a day at TEDx SF 2017, covering everything from synthetic biology and crypto governance to the design of death and why language is humanity's best technology.
Building a Bottlehead Crack headphone amplifier from a kit, complete with paint mishaps, tight soldering, and a Speedball upgrade that made it all worth it.