In 2012 I joined Adam Geller to work on professional development software for teachers. Since then, we've grown Edthena to be the premier tool for all educators to receive video-based feedback and improve their skills.What started as an easy-to-use video upload and commenting tool, has expanded with: goal tracking, data visualizations, recording applications, portfolio building, assignment creation, and shared content libraries.At Edthena we place a high value on end-user experience. We pride ourselves on never releasing features that are confusing or otherwise mismatched with the rest of the system. To that end, every detail of what we create is heavily designed and customized. Everything from our input boxes to our video transcoding pipeline is hand-crafted to deliver the best possible experience to our users.In this role I've learned the incredible value of having developers interact with users. I've personally answered thousands of support tickets over the years. Those interactions force me to continually evolve the product and make it easier for everyone to use.

During business school, Ofer Ronen and I became interested in advertising for unused domain names. We saw "parked pages" as inefficient eyesores. Our idea was to redirect keyword names like autoinsurance.com and computers.com to buyers like Geico and Dell.Ofer worked on sales and the strategic relationships, and I build the tech team and the product (a two-sided marketplace with a bidding interface and a high-volume auction API). We did an A-round with FRC, our revenue shot up to seven digits, and just when we thought everything was going well, the 2008 market crash happened.Rather than fuel the business with increasingly expensive capital, we shopped the company and sold it to IAC. We were absorbed into Ask Sponsored Listings, which later re-branded as Sendori.After the sale, I stayed on for three years and continued to grow the product. During his period, we doubled our revenue and I had the opportunity to redesign most of our core technology. I rewrote the back-end, along with our linguistic matching system, entirely in Erlang.After Sendori, I took some time off to regroup and figure out what I wanted to do next. With my next company I wanted to focus on having a social impact.

After finishing my master's degree I joined Intel as part of the Rotation Engineer Program. I used this opportunity to work on a number of projects that I was otherwise not qualified for. By the end of my first year, I had co-authored two published papers on microprocessor optimizations, filed for two patents, and integrated some of my ideas into the Intel compiler.I'd like to thank my manager Hong Wang, who taught me never to pass up an opportunity - especially if it involves free food.After that I worked for a couple of years validating the Pentium 4 Prescott processor, and then as a senior software engineer on the compiler for embedded architectures. Eventually, I got the entrepreneurial itch, and left to pursue my dream of starting a company.

Connext built software to help power companies manage their grids. Sounds exiting right? Well for a 20-something with no real-world experience, it absolutely was. A combination of drinking coffee, reading a ton of C++ books, and receiving daily encouragement from my teammates got me to a place where I was making significant contributions to the product.I'd like to thank Drake, Lance, and the rest of the team for teaching me, helping me grow, and tolerating my mistakes. For any junior developers reading this - never put swear words in your "impossible to hit" error messages. Someday, someone will trigger that message and I promise you'll hear about it.