prologue

When I was 6 years old I held up an entire commercial flight. I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea of flying at night. I decided to avoid the process altogether by hiding under the chairs in the terminal. Captain Pete was nice enough to walk down the jet bridge and coax me onto the airplane with the promise of touring the flight deck. I remember this moment vividly – it set in motion my ever-intensifying curiosity about how things work. Eleven years later, I became a pilot.

At 11 I built my first computer to play a flight simulator. At 14 I started coding. I became completely absorbed by programming – it was all I wanted to do. So much so, that I gave up paying attention in class. I failed senior English. In turn, the UC system decided to rescind my admission. Suffice it to say, I became very disillusioned with the entire process.

I decided to stay local and give the college admissions thing another shot. At home, I was able to land a research internship at Sandia National Laboratories. I enjoyed the work there so much that I remained year-round during my entire undergraduate degree. While there I ran the entire gamut, from enterprise software to machine learning research to novel anomaly detection algorithms.

My final PI at Sandia, Constantin Brif, inspired my interest in edge tech – specifically quantum computing. I applied for PhD programs in quantum information science. I was accepted to a couple programs, but decided to put the PhD on hold. Instead, I accepted a job offer from IonQ. In the year that followed, I worked on a team of five atomic physicists. Beyond the day-to-day of running the quantum computers, I developed an improved algorithm for determining two-qubit bell state calibration and some work with the theory team on quantum NLP.

I’ve started two companies, and was very early in a third. I was one of two founding engineers on a cross-chain bridge project called Zetachain. I co-founded a DeFi protocol with a friend from college that began by targeting governance extractable value, but later pivoted to on-chain bonds. Currently, I’m working on a new project in zero-knowledge cryptography.