I build things around problems everyone else learned to live with.
I've always been drawn to things that are more complicated, expensive, or opaque than they need to be. I like finding the point where a system stopped serving people, taking it apart, and building a cleaner way through. That thread runs through just about everything I've done.
I'm the CEO and co-founder of Surf, a food ordering agent you can text like a friend. I built it because ordering dinner had somehow turned into 40 apps, a pile of logins, and a marketplace tax. Surf is our answer: one text, one memory across restaurants, and someone who just handles it.
Surf is not a left turn. Weird Hunt used software to make ordinary places feel alive. Be Gone Goods made ingredient lists easier for normal people to understand. NickelCommerce pulled B2B pricing out from behind closed doors. At Workstep and in healthcare consulting, I worked inside large, messy systems and learned exactly where handoffs fail. Different industries, same instinct: find the friction everyone accepts and stop accepting it.
I think the world is full of open secrets: useful ideas hiding in plain sight because each piece lives in a different room. I like crossing the rooms. Economics, software, operations, storytelling, product, whatever the problem needs. I studied management at the University of Texas at Austin and economics at Boston University. Building companies taught me where the frameworks break.
That is what excites me about agents. They can finally leave the chat box and do real work in the world. Surf starts with food, but the bigger idea I care about is what happens when software can reliably act on your behalf.
When I'm not chasing one of those questions, you'll find me on a trail run, playing with my kids, watching baseball, exploring strange corners of the internet, or traveling in search of a good story to bring back home.
The rabbit holes I come back to most:
If you're building something ambitious, or you've found an open secret I should know about, send me an email or find me on Twitter. The blog is still under construction, which is a polished way of saying I haven't finished it yet.