Experience
Co-founder & CTO
- Co-founded universal messaging platform with Eric Migicovsky (Pebble's founder); joined Y Combinator S21.
- Scaled a failing prototype to 100k+ users, sending millions and receiving tens of millions of messages daily across 12 chat networks.
- Built native clients from scratch for iOS (Swift), Android (Kotlin), and Desktop (React/Electron); hired and led a fully remote 20-person engineering team.
- Built Beeper Mini, a standalone Android app enabling real iMessage directly from an Android phone.
- Acquired by Automattic (April 2024) and combined with the also recently acquired Texts.com team to form a standalone messaging division.
Senior Engineering Manager
- Joined at under 100 employees when all of engineering reported directly to the CTO.
- Became Faire's first engineering manager after an initial IC period; defined how the engineering org would scale.
- Led teams across retailer growth, first non-US market expansion (Canada), brand referral program, and first online tradeshow (Faire Summer Market).
Director, Embedded Software
- Joined via Pebble acquisition; led integration of Pebble engineering team and practices.
- Led ~25 engineers across San Diego, San Francisco, Boston, Romania, and Kitchener building the third-party app platform for Fitbit smartwatches.
- Drove the "Fitbit OS" initiative to ship a shared firmware codebase across multiple products simultaneously.
Firmware Engineering Manager & GM, Canadian Office
- Employee #4 during the original Kickstarter; helped scale to 160+ employees and ship over 1M devices.
- Wrote the original watch OS (FreeRTOS on a 128KB RAM microcontroller) and built the third-party app sandbox.
- Grew to lead the ~20-person firmware team; opened and expanded the Kitchener office to 16 people.
Education
University of Waterloo — BASc, Computer Engineering, 2004 – 2009