I have a bit of a mixed startup background in terms of skills and experience as I progressed.

First, I started coding at 12 years old, building Xanga pages, micro-sites and writing ActionScript for interactive Flash games, then later sold my first company at 15.

I ended up pivoting my focus early on to design and front-end development, and building early versions of what we now call design systems, I then later joined the NYC startup ecosystem at a very young age, doing product design & ux-research for early-stage startups.

I then got exposed to the business side of startups, something that's always fascinated me after seeing how intertwined it was with the product side, which led me to pivoting more into growth, often at all stages.

It was interesting to me because a lot of marketers and sales were driving a core part of the business, but lacked the technical skills to optimize or build the product themselves.

I found myself getting deep into all aspects of Growth, from:

1. Zero-to-One Bets
2. Acquisition to Retention
3. SEO to SEM
4. Email to Social
5. A/B Testing to Experimentation
6. Conversion Rate Optimization to Landing Page Optimization
7. Lead Generation to Referral Marketing
8. Content Marketing to Onboarding & Personalization

I've advised startups and led multiple growth teams and initiatives over the years, leveling up my skills while mentoring & coaching other designers & PMs to appreciate "the other side of the business".

I'm now obsessed with automation, LLMs, vector embeddings, agents, async workflows and architecting systems to reduce friction "internally", whereas I see Growth as a way to reduce friction "externally" — the two work beautifully together.

The more efficient we can make the internal processes → the faster we can onboard more customers → the faster we can collect more data and feedback → which results in faster iterations of the product to make it world-class.