Portfolio

These are some of the products I've invented. Never alone — software is a team sport and I deeply believe that the best products come from collaboration.

Bounti

I joined Bounti Labs to re-shape their product strategy and create a product-lead, self-service solution for GTM teams. Collaborated with co-founders, GTM team, and customers to define a solution that can increate prospecting productivity by 10x. Served as interim CTO and re-built the product/design/engineering team, and delivered the new product beta.

Neural networks, agents, and chess

This is a throwback. I got into neural networks over 25 years ago, and had some unorthodox (for the time) ideas about using them as the "intelligence" in goal-seeking agents. My college thesis involved training neural nets to mimic the movements of individual chess pieces in the style of specific players, and writing an agent to evaluate the net-specific outputs and make the best chess move given any board state. Reactive, agent-based, zero-context, zero-search chess playing.

It didn't play great chess but it DID play. It had an especially hard time in the end game.

I recently dug up the weights and agent code, and plugged it into Lichess. Go ahead and challenge it to a game. Appreciate that you're playing software that's old enough to rent a car and that it has no explicit knowledge of the game, is stateless, runs in milliseconds, and uses less than 10 MB of RAM.

Compare this to DeepMind in 2024, who is using a 270M parameter transformer trained on 10 million games!

Vulnerability Management & IAST

I defined the product strategy and lead R&D for New Relic's entry into the Security space. The challenge was to create a useful and effective cybersecurity product that served New Relic's existing users - DevOps Engineers - as well as aspirational users - developers and security engineers. I lead the creation and launch of Vulnerability Management as a disruptive DevSecOps solution that created new value for existing users and attracted new users to New Relic's consumption pricing model. Here's me introducing Vuln Management at FutureStack 2023.

Following a Buy, Build, and Partner strategy, I also drive partnership and product-integration with complementary security vendors like AWS, Snyk, and FOSSA. I lead M&A technical due diligence and integration of K2 Cyber Security, creating the first IAST-capable APM agent in the world.

Full-stack Topology Maps with Timewarp

As a Product Innovation lead at New Relic, I did a deep dive into AIDM. Long-standing user frustration with gaps in our dependency discovery and visual maps lead to a complete re-design of our topology mapping and visualization capabilities. My team created a new universal service map that automatically presented dependencies and data flows between infrastructure, application, microservices, and mobile & browser client apps.

This required deep changes to the New Relic platform, which we successfully drove. I also drove the adoption of our new pluggable mapping system across existing features including infrastructure, distributed tracing, and AIOps. These collaborations lead us to invent Automap and Timewarp, an incident visualization and flight recorder that allows engineers to replay performance and alert activity within a complex system – pinpointing the origin of cascading outages and performance issues.

New Relic One

I was the Director of Engineering for the teams that built new product experiences during New Relic's re-platforming and unification of 12+ siloed products into a single coherent platform and user experience. I supported the teams building data visualizations, federated GraphQL to replace disparate REST APIs, and the product experience team that created new observaibility UI to replace New Relic's legacy product experiences.

Mobile App Performance Management

I lead engineering and was interim product manager for the invention of New Relic Mobile. This was New Relic's second paid product, and the first true performance management tool for native mobile applications – capable of measuring the end-user experience of connected mobile apps so developers can answer that perennial question "is it the app or the server?"

I hired the engineering team, lead technical architecture, served as interim product manager, scaled ops from pre-launch to monitoring over 1 billion mobile app installs, and lead R&D through three major product releases.

Tsunami Inundation and Evacuation Study

I developed an evacuation and survival simulator to study the effects of near-shore tsunamis on the city of Cannon Beach, Oregon. This required porting a research project built on ESRI ArcGIS to run on a pure open source stack, integrating existing GIS data with mathematical inundation models, and implementing monte carlo simulations and pathfinding algorithms to simulate human evacuation behavior. The final report was influential in the city's prioritization of infrastructure improvements and public safety investments.

WeetWoo!

A curated, kid-safe, parent-approved iOS app for entertainment on the go. The first niche video app for iOS; sold over 20,000 copies. Inspired a category that led to the launch of YouTube Kids.