20+ years of diverse managerial and technical experience as a founder, CEO, CTO, engineering leader, and educator in the fields of e-commerce, social media, music, edtech, and more. In a previous life ...... I was a struggling jazz guitarist in Boston, studying with one of the top teachers in the world (Charlie Banacos), and practicing 8 hours a day just to keep up with each week's material. But flexor tendonitis in my fretting arm caused the pivot back to tech, and grad school at the ITP program at NYU.Every day, since then, has been about making things:- online communities for musicians with built-in tools to create lessons, message posts with chords and scales, all the resources needed for users to teach themselves.- a custom-built e-commerce site (for musicians, naturally) when there was no Shopify or Magento, complete with dynamic fulfillment options (which distributor currently has the best price?), inventory management, and a Zendesk-like customer service area (when there was no Zendesk) with intelligent wizards to auto-email customers & suppliers alike.- an integrated video & music sequencer (think Instagram meets Pro Tools, except that both influence each other), complete with sample banks, libraries of visual overlays & effects, and hundreds of music video style templates, all driven using a custom syntax for attack, sustain, velocity, etc. on both video and audio channels, and defined in, er, Google Sheets.Today, it's all about making great teams that produce software at scale with high observability, maintainability, and extensibility, while fostering a culture of diligence, humility, transparency, and most importantly, levity -- as the legendary guitarist Mick Goodrick once wrote, "humor is one of the few things worth taking seriously".