About

I grew up in Cleveland, the oldest of four boys and the biggest little fan of the 1995 baseball team and LeBron James’ ascendance. Then I went across the country to Pomona College, where I studied economics and math, first performed improv for paying audiences, and got ankle tattoos.

My immediate plans after college fell apart, well, immediately, so I cold applied to a couple jobs and took a customer service role at Facebook. After a brief stint answering angry questions and taking nudes off the site, I moved to the Platform Policy team, where we shut down apps when they were bad. Then I went to Twitter to start and manage their API Policy team. It was mostly more of the same, though we also helped developers build better apps when we could. And that’s where I honed a passion for user experience – whether on apps that I work on directly, or helping people better understand the apps and other products they use. Ultimately though, Silicon Valley was not for me.

I moved to North Carolina for my second career, which was helping Know Me conceive, create, and launch their apps. There were also weekends and summers presenting youth programs at a science museum, and countless nights teaching and performing improv, sketch, and standup at DSI. We were good enough to make the Del Close Marathon a bunch of years in a row, and that was always fun. So I owe it a lot, and wasn’t there at the very end, but if you know you know. In between all this I took two sabbaticals to ride a skateboard down the eastern seaboard.

Then I moved to Florida to be closer to family. I wrapped up my work with Know Me after a major overhaul of their flagship app, and got into the local improv scene. By day, I do contract tech work remotely for small businesses and in-home IT support for the vast network of retired Florida folks. By nights and weekends, I perform with Actor’s Rep or Improv U. I snuck in a few classes from the Burt Reynolds Institute before he passed away, even though he never showed up. And I led an improv workshop at the 2018 i3 BUILD Summit at Pitt – never invited back!