Private, personalized parties in Fortnite and Roblox on demand! I led all parts of this project outside of game development.

It started as Republic Realm, focused on "the metaverse" and crypto-technology. We since pivoted into gaming and raised $70M+ from top tier investors like A16z, Coinbase Venuters, Lightspeed, and more.

SMAS started on a spreadsheet at my office, trying to set up randomized lunch dates to meet new colleagues. Then COVID happened, so I productized it and took it online! We reached thousands of members using SaveMeASeat from companies like AirBnB, Spotify, and others.

Maybe I got tricked by my kids on this one. They bet me I couldn't make a website using GPT3.5 that will write papers for students. At least I don't give my kids free credits to this magic machine! xD

I got caught up in the NFT craze - so, I built a Dapp (Decentralized app, sort of.) that went out into the ethos of Discord and Twitter and pulled in all the important information and announcements for each NFT community into one place. All you had to do was connect your wallet and boom, it read the NFTs that were in your wallet and displayed your personalized feed of info just for you!

Sure, I can share my Github link with people, but everything I do, I do in private repositories. So, to the layman, it looks like I created an account 8 years ago and barely use it. Little do they know I have 60+ repositories full of 4M+ lines of code. Gitcred looks at ALL of your Github activity, even the private repos, and gives you a ranking and credential based off all of the data we've reviewed from other profiles.

I created Stumbleapod (awesome name, right?) because I wanted to discover more podcasts like the ones I love. I also wanted to clip certain parts of wisdom from podcasts I listen to and felt other clipping/bookmarking features weren't great. Anyway, I created this web and iOS app.

My kids were looking for a way to chat with their friends via voicechat/video chat while playing video games that was lower friction than discord, so I built this webapp that allows you to find people playing the same game as you, or allows you to create a chat room to invite your gaming friends to.

I forgot my anniversary, and her birthday, multiple times. So, I built a website that allows you to pick your anniversary date as well as other important dates on the calendar (Valentine's, Birthdays, etc.) and it would automatically buy flowers for you each year on those dates.

When I worked in venture capital, we tracked deals in a spreadsheet, we didn't write anything down about pitches we heard, and we didn't track our group's communications. It was mind boggling. So, I build this webapp to track companies, capture institutional knowledge, move deals through our pipeline, and more. This was a sweet little tool, I miss it!

This one was so much fun. I created a website that allowed users to post about their bad day, then other people could come in and buy any one of those "bad day" posts a pizza -- they would buy themselves a t-shirt for $30, and $15 of it would go toward a pizza gift card to the original poster.

Molecular Biologist

2011-2012

I was originally inspired by Jurassic Park to study genetic engineering. However, since the whole ethics of bringing dinosaurs back from the dead wasn't worked out yet, I moved on to genetic engineering in plants. In my first post-college role, I ran assays inspecting thousands of plant tissue samples a day looking for specific genetics that we were trying to move into plants. It was monotonous and I didn't want to do this for long.

Project Manager

2012-2013

I wanted to get away from being an individual contributor and learn about leading teams of high caliber professionals across boundaries, so I took a role in project management with Eli Lilly. Unfortunately, it was in discovery phase oncology drugs, which drained me personally because we were just throwing different compounds off the wall that could make sick people sicker. Anyway, I discovered that pharma wasn't for me, and after a year, I started looking for new roles.

Research Operations Lead

2013 - 2016

Supply and demand. I was a young kid with lots of scientific experience in plants and agriculture, and some team leading experience - and this research site in Hawai'i had a hard time finding qualified candidates that were ready to move to a rural island of 60,000 people. So, we were a perfect match! I started coding software to help me manage my research site, both operational support software as well as scientific breeding software -- which, ultimately led me to my next thing...

Adjunct Professor - Biology

2014 - 2016

While I was running the research operation in Hawai'i, I also moonlighted as a remote community college professor at the community college that I went to. Talk about full circle! This was such an honor, I loved it.

Global Product Lead

2017 - 2019

So HQ got wind of the software I was building for my site. One thing led to another and I moved to Raleigh from Hawai'i and helped build teams and software products to help manage research stations (ops tools and genetics tools) for our "Trait Integration Pipeline" - in laymans terms, I was building teams to buld software to help move genetics into corn, cotton, soy, and sunflower crops!

Sr Software Engineer

2018 - 2019

I'm a startup junky and my passion is building. I'm doing all of these side projects on my own time. My friend started a company and they needed engineers. I wanted to see what it was like working in a tech company with that "Silicon Valley" feel to see if I liked it or not. So, I moonlighted yet again as a senior software engineer at his company for about a year. The product, a social travel platform, never really caught on and my friend ended up walking away -- but it was still a fun learning experience for me!

Director Portfolio Management

2019 - 2021

I was tired of building software for ag. I really wanted to either start my own company, or join a rising startup and be in the first 25 at a startup. I thought a good transition to that would be to join the Venture Capital team at Syngenta, so I could see a bunch of startups, study them, and either start my own or find one to join. I decided to get my MBA at Duke at this time, too. In this role I sourced deal flow, listened to pitches, gave feedback, and championed deals. Implemented a single-point-of-truth record keeping system and loads of institutional knowledge capture processes and tools. I also built a web application (DealFloPro) that was essentially a CRM for venture capital as well as a portfolio management tool rolled into one.

Founder

2020 - 2021

I started this business on the side while doing my MBA at Duke. Once every few weeks, we would take a company's roster and break it down into small networking groups of 4 people. We found time on their calendars that were open and overlapped, and scheduled a meeting for them to meet on our video meeting platform where they would meet, answer fun icebreaker questions, and get to know one another! We got some initial traction, but I ended up selling it (and then buying it back) because I wanted to pursue an opportunity with a crypto/blockchain company.

Director Product Engineering

2021 - Present

Employee #10 and first "technical" hire, I helped build out the product and engineering processes here while we raised $65M+ from A16z, Coinbase, and more. We created fun stuff like a Megayacht NFT (Yes, it sold for $750k at the time), Bedlam (link in bio for gamers), Hometopia (co-op home renovation game), and RU1 (personalized worlds in Fortnite and Roblox) among other things.