I've chased the same thing across two continents and four cities: building things that bring people together.

I grew up on the south shore of Owasco Lake, one of the smaller Finger Lakes, in a stretch of upstate New York where the closest thing to a skyline is a grain silo. My graduating class at Southern Cayuga was fifty-five people — small enough that everyone knew everyone, and small enough to make me deeply curious about everywhere else.

That curiosity turned out to be the whole plot.

So I went to the biggest place I could find. At The City College of New York I studied International Studies and Asian Studies — international development, mostly, and Mandarin. But the education that stuck happened off-campus: I co-founded a Harlem chapter of Food Not Bombs, turning food that would have been thrown away into meals with a crew of sixteen volunteers, and earned the Colin Powell Community Engagement Fellowship for it.

It was the first time I understood that building something and building community were the same act. I've been chasing that overlap ever since.

Then I went about as far from Owasco Lake as the map allows. I managed a China study-abroad program out of Brooklyn College, studied at Shanghai University, and spent a stint in Xi'an researching clean-water policy. In Hangzhou I co-founded nihub, an innovation center — we raised a ¥100M fund, launched a ¥10M accelerator with Coca-Cola, and I advised more than fifty founding teams. Later, in Shanghai, I mentored startups as an Entrepreneur in Residence at WeWork Labs.

Four cities, a language I had to earn, and a lasting habit of building across cultures instead of around them.

I came home to New York at the end of 2019, and by March of 2020 I'd landed in Durham, North Carolina — where I still am. At REZI I led growth as we took a rental marketplace from $5M to more than $100M in GMV across fourteen cities. Somewhere in there the work changed: I stopped handing specs across the wall and started writing the software myself.

Today I build at the intersection of product, engineering, and design — shipping production apps hands-on with AI-assisted development at Ryse and on my own project, bartr. Same plot as always: build things that bring people together. Just with my hands on the code now.