Updates
After nearly 10 years growing Tulip from 6 people to 300+ and from a $15M to $1.3B valuation, I recognized it was time to move on. While job-hopping is common, building something meaningful takes time, a bet I made from day one with Tulip. I started 4 engineering groups, worked across nearly every part of the product, and built the internal systems powering Tulip's finance and sales teams. Through both successes and failures, I learned firsthand what it takes to build a product, a team, a culture, and a company.
So what am I up to now? In short, a little rest and a lot of code. After going straight from a PhD at MIT to 10 years at Tulip, I'm taking time for my family. We just spent a month in Vietnam! I'm also helping friends' companies explore practical AI and LLM solutions beyond the hype. I am excited for this technical sabbatical and what comes next. Below you will find a selection of relevant current and past production work, my academic background, and some fun traveling reflections.
Professional & Technical
$1.3 Billion Valuation
When Tulip's CFO called our financial systems a "house of cards" threatening the company's ability to secure funding and an eventual IPO, it got my attention. I took the technical and project lead to overhaul Tulip's financial systems. I transformed a broken system with no "source of truth" that required weeks of manual reconciliation every quarter into an accurate and reliable production system connecting Salesforce, NetSuite, BI tools, and our data warehouse. This system is now the backbone of Tulip's sales and financial operations.
Academic Background
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
I earned my PhD from MIT in 2015 from the renowned MIT Media Lab. The Media Lab is organized into diverse, interdisciplinary research groups. I spent years working with amazing scientists, engineers, designers and artists on collaborative projects and my own research. My research covered ML/AI, robotics and ultimately focused heavily on learning technologies for children. I developed a "product first" approach to research and engineering. Ultimately my passion for product led me into entrepreneurship and away from academia, but the skills and insights I developed at MIT continue to serve me well.
Read more...
Human Robot Interaction
I contributed to research at both UCSD and MIT in robotics. Much of this work focused on social robots as a tool for education with children. In addition to field research, I contributed work in Machine Vision and contributed to the development of a Robot Operating System that provided a comprehensive communication platform for robotics, including both sensory and control.
Read more...
Machine Vision
I started doing research in Machine Learning and AI as an undergraduate at the University of California, San Diego. At the time, we built neural networks from scratch in C/C++ and Matlab. My work focused on a hierarchical Haar filter approach to facial feature localization. My work was the first to show that this approach to machine vision feature localization can achieve highly accurate results. My work was eventually productized in early Sony cameras that performed face detection.
Read more...
Storycraft for the Internet of Things
In my PhD work I blended my passions for technologies with my desires to help others by creating an educational platform for creating interactive stories across digital and physical spaces, Storycraft for the Internet of Things. I used this platform to evaluate a number of education goals across a varied set of learners. Much of my research focused on the use of my platform for facilitating in-person collaboration around language for children diagnosed with autism.
Read more...Travel & Adventures
Vietnam Street Food
Boating along the Beautiful Ninh Binh River
Egypt
Vietnam Street Food
For my wife and I traveling has been an important part of our life together. This year we got to take our daughter to Vietnam for her first time. My wife is originally from Vietnam, and I had traveled there twice, but our daughter had not yet gone. We spent Christmas and New Years in Vietnam, and we all had a great time. Vietnam is a wonderful country to visit, with nice people and amazing food. If you ever have the chance I highly recommend traveling there.