TLDR: I have a decade of experience building companies and consumer products. I started off in the 📰 media/journalism space, moved into 💬 conversational tech (messaging platforms), delved into the ✨ creator economy, explored 🍕 food media, spent time building a 🤝 consumer social app that’s all about bringing people together and creating friendships, and built monetization features for ❤️ dating apps.
1991 - Born and raised in Houston, TX.
2009 - 2013: Studied political science at UCONN, found out I like to read things like John Locke's Second Treatise on Government.
2012 - Interned on The Hill, realized I wanted to work on solutions for creating a better informed electorate. Started a Tumblr blog called Purple Politics writing in-depth explainers on things like the U.S. prison system and healthcare reform.
2013 - 2015: Moved to NYC to attend the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and receive my Masters in Entrepreneurial Journalism. Continued working on Purple Politics as a side project. Wrote an 8,000 word explainer on healthcare reform in the U.S. for my thesis project.
2015: Started Purple as Cofounder and CEO with David Heimann. After Twilio experiment and doing a bunch of things that didn't scale, created an SMS platform to cover the 2016 election via text message. Covered live events like presidential debates and Town Halls, created a new storytelling format that we dubbed Conversational Journalism. Raised over $750K in capital at the age of 24.
2016: Covered the craziest U.S. presidential election in modern history entirely via text message. Went through **Techstars NY** '16 summer cohort, grew the Purple team, and worked with cool partners like Univision. Expanded platforms to Facebook Messenger. Inspired folks like the NYT to experiment with SMS, spoke at a few conferences, and chatted with Kara Swisher about what we were building.
2017: Built the Purple platform out for other creators & publishers to use. Generated all creator and publisher partnerships and was able to work with amazing creators, Youtubers, and publishers like the New Yorker, NBC, and The Skimm.
2019: Purple was acquired by The Skimm, started a new chapter with The Infatuation's product team overseeing the development of Text Rex and launched/managed the company's first ever membership program.
2020 - 2023: Joined the Pie Labs ****team as a cofounder and product leader alongside my friend Andy Dunn and other amazing humans. Worked on building the best way to meet new friends + connect IRL. Managed a product team of 12 and led the development of the MVP of our iOS app.
2023: Joined the monetization team at Grindr as Principle Product Manager for Microtransactions. My team focused on non-recurring revenue generation features, aka Micros, aka IAP (in-app payments). We leveraged experimentation to optimize pricing for our features across global markets, resulting in increased performance and sales. We built and launched a brand new micro feature. We redesigned algorithms that led to an increase in sales and repurchase rate of our core feature, Boost, and under our tenure the company saw the highest boost sales days ever in Grindr history.
Unfortunately, this happened. I left Grindr along with many of my colleagues in August 2023.