About

there's this thing that happens when you're a kid and you find something you can do that the adults around you can't. it makes you strange, mostly. i was 13, and what i had found was that if you typed a certain sequence of characters into a plain text editor and saved the file with a specific extension, you had an actual working website. a few steps later, you could send someone a link and they would see it too. i don't think anyone who was already an adult when the internet arrived can fully understand what that felt like from the other side of it. i had found a back room to the world that someone had left unlocked.

nobody in my house did this. i mostly kept the thing i cared about to myself, because when i tried to explain it i could see everyone including me getting a little uncomfortable. i'd say "i'm making a website" and my family would nod the way you nod at a child with a toy. the toy was for a client in another country and i was getting paid for it and i was twelve. i thought this was normal for a while. i think most people who start early only realize much later, once they've met enough other people, that they had a slightly odd one of these.

so, dreamer, yeah. i've been called that a lot and i don't hate it, though it undersells what actually happened, which is that i was a kid with a suspicion. the suspicion was that the world is a lot more malleable than anyone around me was behaving like it was. that the shape of things is a decision someone made recently enough that someone else could still make it differently. i couldn't have put it in those words at the time. what i had was a stomach-level conviction that i needed to be in the room where the shape got decided, and i started acting on that before i had any evidence anyone would ever let me in.

ux i found sideways, because there was no front door to walk through. i was building websites and some of them felt right and some of them felt wrong and i couldn't say why. it drove me a little crazy. i'd sit with a page that technically did everything it was supposed to do and it would still feel bad, and i could not stop turning it over trying to work out where the badness was. i think a lot of designers have a version of this story and most of them tell it more flatteringly than it really deserves. mine was mostly annoyance. that was the whole thing, though. you can't make something better if you don't first notice, in your body, that it is worse than it should be. the noticing is the job, and the craft comes later.

what i landed on somewhere around sixteen or seventeen was that the products that had actually moved me had almost nothing between me and what i was trying to do. the good ones almost weren't there. you would forget you were using software at all. at the time it felt like a revelation, because the whole industry seemed to be going the other direction. everyone was adding things. i started paying attention to how much of a product's job is to disappear, how the whole discipline at its best is a kind of vanishing act. i still find that a bit sad, honestly. we spend years learning to do a thing whose highest form is not being noticed at all.

then web3 happened, and then ai happened, and both handed me the same assignment, which is figuring out how a normal person is supposed to touch this. crypto arrived without any settled vocabulary for what a wallet was or what an address meant or what any of the primitive concepts should feel like once you had to put them on a screen. i spent some years designing consumer crypto with a founder and most of the work was arguing about what the thing even was. there was no reference to pull up. you couldn't ask how instagram or airbnb had done it, because instagram and airbnb had never done it. we were the reference

ai is like that now only more so, and moving faster. the model can do something genuinely new every few weeks and someone has to work out what that thing is supposed to feel like when a person meets it for the first time. most of those calls are getting made by inertia right now, by whatever the last team did or whatever the engineer used to build the demo. i understand why. mostly it's fine, but the interfaces we ship this year are the ones people will still be reaching for years from now, and if we get them wrong we are going to have to live with the wrong versions for a long time. i don't think most people making these calls have quite absorbed that yet. i think about it a lot.

i've also moved around a lot, lived in 3 continents by 22. every time you change countries you also change which invisible assumptions are the default ones, and it takes about six months in a new place before you can start to tell which of your reactions to things were actually you and which of them were the water you'd been swimming in. i don't want to make this sound more romantic than it was. traveling by itself doesn't automatically improve anyone. what moving between places did for me, specifically, was make it impossible to design for the average user with a straight face. there is no average user, there is only a specific person on a specific afternoon, and the design either meets them where they are or it doesn't.

people ask what i want out of a career and the honest answer is simple. i want to be near problems hard enough that i have to become somebody better to solve them. i want to be wrong cheaply and often, and to be delighted about that rather than defensive when it happens. i learn fast, faster than is reasonable really, and i say that as description more than boast because it has often been a lot for the people working with me and i've had to make my peace with that side of it. past the fast part, the thing that has actually mattered, the thing most people don't stick with, is staying curious well after being curious stops being comfortable. that is the part i keep leaning into.

i'm optimistic. i know that world has been drained of meaning by a decade of tech marketing, so let me try to say it in a way that means something to me. i think the tools we build will, on balance, let people reach parts of themselves they did not previously know how to get to. i think we underestimate how much of what makes a person feel like a person is friction with the world, and how much a well-made tool is a considered reduction of the friction that wasn't doing anyone any good, so the friction that mattered can start to matter more. that is the future i want to help build. slowly enough that we notice when we're getting it wrong.

every bet on me has paid off so far. ready to go big.