I’m drawn to the gap between how things are supposed to work and how they actually work.
That gap is where the interesting stuff lives. Where consumer behavior diverges from what marketers assumed, where a process that looks efficient on paper quietly destroys morale at the edges, where a product with great metrics is still solving the wrong problem. I’ve spent most of my career poking at that gap from different directions.
My undergraduate degrees were in Computer Engineering and Philosophy, which sounds like an accident but wasn’t. Engineering gave me a way to see systems: inputs, outputs, failure modes, leverage. Philosophy gave me a way to question what the system is even for. I’ve never fully shaken either instinct, and I don’t want to.
Eight years in the Navy sharpened both. When you’re writing operational procedures that real people will follow under real stress, you learn very quickly which assumptions were wrong. I built planning systems that scaled capacity 100x, but more importantly, I watched enough things break to develop a deep respect for the distance between a plan and its execution. That’s probably why I’m skeptical of clean frameworks and drawn to the messy, human parts of any problem.
At Amazon, I worked on the third-party seller marketplace, a genuinely complex ecosystem where the incentives of sellers, buyers, and the platform itself don’t always point in the same direction. I spent a lot of time trying to understand what sellers actually needed versus what they said they needed versus what their behavior revealed. That triangulation between stated preferences, revealed behavior, and system-level data is the kind of problem I find genuinely fun.
The consumer research I did at Yale’s Center for Customer Insights pushed me further in that direction. Sitting in on interviews, watching people rationalize choices they’d already made emotionally, seeing how tiny framing shifts change what feels like a reasonable price. It reinforced something I keep coming back to: the most important thing a product team can do is understand what’s actually driving behavior, not just what users report.
I also can’t stop building things. Not as a hobby, exactly. More like a compulsion. When I hit friction I can’t stop thinking about it until I’ve either solved it or convinced myself it’s unsolvable. That’s led me to ship a consumer app for tactical cognitive training, build AI-powered automation tools for PM workflows, develop a quantitative platform for quarterback evaluation, and wire together a personalized news intelligence system. None of them started as portfolio pieces. Each one started with a specific annoyance I couldn’t ignore.
Outside of all that, I spent years as a nationally ranked Sabre fencer and have trained in five martial arts. I lived in Naples for two years and speak Italian well enough joke with other italians about Napoli. I’m currently at Yale finishing my MBA, where I spend a lot of time thinking about behavioral science, markets, and how to apply both to consumer products.
If any of that sounds like your kind of person, I’d like to talk.