I want to live on Sesame Street. Walkable, leafy, intergenerational, communal. Imagine saying hello to children and kind shopkeepers. Friends everywhere you look. Conversations, teaching, learning. Community.
Throughout my adult life, I’ve noticed that I keep founding things. Code, intellectual frameworks, organizations, communities, even email lists or blogs. Small projects, institutions, everything in between. My dream is to be a sort of Johnny Appleseed figure: planting seeds, nurturing them to be sustainable, and, once they’re ready, walking away towards the next stretch of forest that needs to be planted.
On the other hand, I’ve noticed that I love upgrading or contributing to things that already exist. Anyone can start something new. But to take an existing project (with its own history, dependencies, stakeholders, and momentum) and help it grow? That takes a real hero.
So what ties it all together? Well, Sesame Street is also about teaching and learning. I love learning more about the world. I’ve been writing and thinking in public my entire adult life. Sometimes I learn by building from scratch. Sometimes by improving what exists. In any case: this is what I do for fun — learning, teaching, plotting, and building. (And board and video games — ask me about Gloomhaven!)
Living and thinking in public: that’s the mission of this website.
My computer life
I founded a startup or two post college. I’ve trained as a software engineer and computer scientist. But I keep (by accident!) ending up in the data/stats/a-b testing part of the computer world.
You know how Wikipedia asked you for money? I learned stats and data engineering to help double its fundraising haul in one year. Lots of stuff about theory of probability and “how do you know when to stop an a/b test?” Then they used the system I built to train all new hires in the intuition of what they could try.
Remember how (one part of) Facebook tried to fight spam/bots/foreign propaganda in the late 2010s? I took the opening of the 2017 Alabama special election, grabbed a few buddies to help, and we built the central data system that powered a ton of Facebook’s integrity efforts for years to come. Mark Zuckerberg cited it in congressional testimony. That was wild. Sheryl Sandberg, when she was briefed on it, said: “Now I can rest easy, knowing we track this stuff.”
Then I helped build the first war room to monitor elections in 2018. You may remember the media frenzy about it. Among a ton of other responsibilities, I had a ton of fun building an AI/embeddings tool in a couple days and rolling it out. Later, I set up the first set of company product metrics: now we could track how product changes would make the problem worse (or better).
It was intense! And I was in love. So I moved to Boston and put it all behind me, at least for a while. I joined the Presto team and helped improve a legit, high-quality, high-performance, distributed data engine. Being paid to write industrial strength open-source code! A dream!
Organizations
After spending years protecting elections (and being careful to be neutral, nonpartisan, professional), I didn’t want to spend the 2020 election on the sidelines. I joined a polling firm / super pac and grew/led the engineering team. It was the best job of my life. Our team made the margin of victory in the 2020 election. Not in a “someone gave us money to do a thing, and if they had given money to someone else, they would have done it instead” way. If not us, no one else would have been able to do it. I saw a well-run startup from the inside. And I got inspired!
So I founded my own think tank — Integrity Institute. We focused on how to fix social platforms, powered by people who (like me) had experience inside the platforms, on the “fix it” team. I got a cofounder, funding, staff, community. We talked to too many important people and organizations to name: governments, NGOs, other think tanks, companies. And we made a difference. It’s still around and doing good work.
It became 2024, and I got the itch to get off the sidelines again. So I founded a pop-up election tech project with friends. The plan was to show how to do online politics in a much more effective and wholesome way. Both by writing out exactly how, and showing what (the most basic/easy form) could look like. Senior people in elections and media cheered us on.
Learning
But, at the end of the day, I’m on a journey to better understand the world. I learn by writing, teaching, asking questions, and doing.
I got bit by the writing-in-public bug in Rochester in high school, then had all sorts of adventures in college. I kept it up somewhat since, with a project or two, and had the honor of playing a small part in launching Current Affairs Magazine. I’ve dabbled in big fancy thought leadership (easier when you run a think tank!) via magazines, press coverage, blog posts, presentations, small group conversations — all of it. It is exhilarating. I love it.
Lately, I’m rethinking a lot. These days, to me, the most important ideas are less critique, and more plotting. Less “this is bad” or “it sure would be nice if X”; more “here’s how we take our skills, connections, resources at hand and combine them to fix problems or build solutions”.
Now
Lately, my baby was born. Now, I’m still the same person, but maybe a bit more mellow. I love seeing the world through my baby’s eyes. So full of joy. So full of wonder.
And, now that he’s in daycare (and my wife is healthy), it’s time to figure out what’s next. Presumably a job – building things, working with good people, learning deeply about how the world works.
Have ideas? Let’s talk.
Thanks for being here.
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Get a quick understanding of how I’m doing now, or a brief overview of my (adult) life story, or maybe we can work together on some of my latest projects.