Hi! I believe most problems, spanning personal, organizational, and technical, come from operating on our ideas about reality rather than reality itself. I'm interested in practices, systems, and tools that help people and teams perceive more clearly and act from what's actually there.
I enjoy spending time with people, learning, and tinkering. Previously, I co-founded and led engineering for Levels, a startup that helps people improve their metabolic health, and led engineering for Google Voice for Workspace.
If you're reading this, I'd probably love meeting. What I'm up to now, recommendations of my favorite things, selected works of pottery.
Open questions
Perception, capacity, and change
What we're capable of starts with what we can perceive.
- Why does shifting what you attend to change what you're capable of?
- What's the difference between understanding something and being changed by it? Can you design for the latter?
- Why do people and organizations get stuck in patterns that used to work, and what makes the difference between those who unstick and those who don't?
- What would it take to transmit transformative practice at scale without it collapsing into information transfer?
Organizations and coordination
What we can do together is a harder problem than what we can do alone.
- What do organizations already know about coordinating intelligence that AI systems haven't figured out yet?
- Why doesn't knowing what makes teams effective actually make teams effective?
- Why do coordination failures eat everything (platforms, institutions, science, attention) and what are the actual levers against them?
Tools and systems
What we build reflects what we value, and then shapes what we can see.
- What should personal software look like when it's designed for how people actually think, rather than for how companies capture value?
- What happens when the cost of bespoke software collapses toward zero? Who gets to shape their own tools, and what changes?
- How do you build systems that help people perceive more clearly rather than optimizing for metrics that corrupt what they measure?
- How do you keep shared information environments from degrading when pollution is cheap and attention is the extractable resource?
Interests
- Dzogchen, Vajrayana, and contemplative phenomenology
- Organizational dynamics as a design problem
- Multi-agent coordination (human and artificial), collective intelligence
- Developmental psychology (Kegan)
- Personal software
- How direct experience intersects with analytical rigor
- Startup engineering leadership
- Town, city, country design
- Mountain sports (trail running, mountain biking, climbing)
Personal Influences
I've been influenced by several people and lineages. This won't be entirely legible, but is the best I can do to cite my sources in the deepest way possible. I would enthusiastically share more if you're interested in any of these.
David Chapman, Charlie Awbery, Evolving Ground, the Nyingma school, Ari Nielsen, Ultraspeaking, Robert Kegan, Christopher Alexander, Heidegger, Peter Ralston, Bruce Di Marsico, Douglas Hofstadter, Keith Johnstone, Thomas Kuhn
About this site
This is a custom theme, originally built on top of the Ghost theme Journal. I borrowed a lot of the minimalist design inspiration from personal sites of Manuel Moreale, Callum Flack, and Craig Mod.
Contact me
If you'd like to chat directly, feel free to email me at [email protected]. I'm also fairly active on Twitter, and am happy to meet in person if you're near southwest Colorado.