Career Background

I decided on a career in building software when, working in consulting just out of college, I received a PowerPoint presentation in my email with a title like “Presentation_v73_Final_v2_1130am.pptx.” I had seen a glimpse of terrible enterprise collaboration workflows, and they were dragging down the entire organization’s productivity.

To fix these broken collaboration workflows, in 2011 I co-founded a real-time document collaboration startup called LiveLoop to provide “multiplayer as a service” for single-user applications. We raised our Seed and Series A financing rounds from New Enterprise Associates, Webb Investment Network, and various angel investors, and shipped our first product on top of Microsoft Office, using a novel variation of operational transformation to turn desktop PowerPoint into a keystroke-by-keystroke real-time collaborative application. We sold LiveLoop to Microsoft in 2015, where I joined as a product manager to ship the collaboration service that currently powers real-time collaboration for hundreds of millions of Office users across PowerPoint, Excel and Word.

I joined Anorak as a Venture Partner in 2022, and shortly thereafter as a full Partner, to invest in founders solving problems with new or emerging technology, particularly at the boundaries of the physical and digital worlds: VR and augmented reality, computer vision and AI, robotics and automation, and 3D computing. While at Anorak, I led our investments in Irrigreen, Prisms of Reality, Virtex Stadium, Astrobeam, and others.

As a father of three children, in 2024 I became increasingly focused on the problem of computing for children. In May 2024, I left my full-time role at Anorak Ventures to co-found Cartwheel, a new company building technology for creative and curious children. Anorak Ventures was the first investor in Cartwheel and I remain a Venture Partner at Anorak.

Fun Facts

In March 2021, I competed on the TV game show Jeopardy! and was a 2-day champion:

Competing over three days, I got to experience 90 minutes of fame, with Twitter giving my mustache a thumbs-up and my slow, deliberative responses a thumbs down:

Fifteen years earlier, I threw a party in college for time travelers, which received front page coverage in the New York Times. Stephen Hawking later hosted a suspiciously similar party, with similar results.