The story

How I got here

I’ve been hooked on technology since college — the type who reads the release notes for fun and has usually already broken the thing everyone’s just hearing about. That curiosity is the throughline of everything I’ve done: I like being early, understanding how something actually works under the hood, and finding where it’s genuinely useful instead of just loud.

I started at Spectrum as an intern in 2011 and grew up inside the company. I came through account management and paid media — work that taught me to make the numbers move and prove it — then into operations and analytics, where my obsession with measurement took over. Today I lead AI, data, and R&D.

These days the job is mostly judgment: which problems are actually worth pointing AI at, which platform fits which use case, and how to get real people to adopt the result. I spend a lot of time at the seam between open-source and enterprise tooling — helping teams decide when to self-host for cost or privacy, and when a managed platform earns its keep.

I’m allergic to hype. The AI conversation is loud and mostly theoretical, and I care far more about what survives contact with production. That’s why I write — to share the parts that actually worked, and the trade-offs nobody mentions in the demo.