HRA is an angel investing group composed of Googler and Xoogler engineers and product managers. We invest in concept-stage technology startups, with a particular emphasis on companies where our expertise in product design, back-end scalability, and machine learning can enable a disproportionate competitive advantage for portfolio companies.Current and past investments include:* LucidChart * Remix (acquired by Via Transportation)* ArtFinder* Minibar (acquired by ReserveBar)* FrontBack* MortarData (acquired by DataDog)* HyperPublic (acquired by Groupon)* SetJam (acquired by Motorola).* Stellic* Nautilus Labs* Muse

Active investor through a variety of LP position in venture funds and angel networks, including:* 99 Tartans* TBD Angels* Hustle Fund (I, II, and III) * Hustle Fund Angel Squad* Robotics Hub Fund I* Ardent Ventures Fund I* Twine Ventures Fund I* Triatomic CapitalSelected direct investments through these affiliations include: Sila, FleetPanda, Unstack, CodeCov, Boom Supersonic, Red Leader, Vimcal, AngelList Venture, Folia Health

Started in a half-time role focused on establishing basic business operations for this brand-new AI agent startup, responsible for recruiting, people operations, finance, compliance, etc. Over time this grew into a full-time cofounder role, with leadership responsibility spanning product strategy, operations, and engineering. Led the team through several prototypes focused on establishing a path to PMF.

I help product and engineering organizations navigate critical inflection points in their growth journey. Whether you need to scale your organization, develop your people, or steer through disruptive changes, I'm here to help. My practice draws on two decades of experience leading engineering teams at a mix of startups and large companies, as well as lessons learned as an advisor to dozens of startups from my personal angel investment portfolio.

2022: Engineering lead for Facebook News relevance, ranking, and recommendations. Supported 35 ML and infrastructure SWEs responsible for the overall relevance of stories and articles from news publications presented to Facebook users. As Facebook moved to end-of-life products focused on news, this team shifted focus to similar technical challenges related to Creator content on Facebook.2021: Engineering manager in Instagram Product Foundations. Supported multiple teams:* Notification Systems: The toolchain used by Instagram feature teams to deliver notifications to Instagram users. Helped the team develop a system to pay down long-standing technical debt while still delivering incremental impact each half. Sponsored a new team that brought ML techniques to Instagram notifications, with rapid success in optimizing which notifications to send and what time of day to send them, resulting in substantial increases in user engagement with notifications.* Design Systems: The team responsible for developing a coherent design system for Instagram that feels consistent across all features and app experiences. Specialized in helping the team to develop a strategy for i18n investment and generating executive support for a11y work. * Android Experience: A new team focused on elevating the Instagram experience for Android developers globally by building in a more Android-native style across the app.2020: Engineering lead for a skunkworks team focused on redefining and rebuilding Facebook's entire internal product suite for recruiting to adapt to a remote-first world. Evaluated all aspects of the existing recruiting toolchain and studied best practices in remote hiring from across industry. Ultimately recommended to executive stakeholders that the best path for Facebook was to make incremental investment in the existing toolchain rather than rebuilding from scratch.

Led the Practice Management engineering team, ~30 SWEs focused on helping community cancer clinics operate the billing mechanics of their practice. Focused primarily developing front-line engineering management through scaling team operations. Also got into the weeds on database performance, helping to improve performance of core product workflows 20x in the 95th percentile case.

Led cross-functional (software, UX, policy, etc) efforts preventing the spread of [m|d]isinformation on all Google products, as well as on the broader web.* Developing new human evaluation methodologies to reliably identify [m|d]isinformation* Designing novel web document and web site signals to quantify the risk of [m|d]isinformation* Prototyping and testing user interfaces to help search users recognize [m|d]isinformation

Leader of a broad range of software engineering teams working to enable social impact through Google and its technology. Efforts I've led include:* Crisis Response (Oct 2012 - Dec 2015), including Google's responses to the Boston Marathon Bombing, Typhoon Haiyan, and the West Africa Ebola outbreak (see also projectbuendia.org, spawned by the Ebola response)* Civic Innovation, including election information features in democracies around the globe, including the US, India, the UK, Brazil, France, Canada, Mexico, etc.* New initiatives focused on opportunities for social impact in the developing world

* Reformed engineering from a key weakness to core strength for the company* Collaborated across the executive team on corporate strategy, including branding, marketing, customer experience, operations, and technology* Represented engineering and technology to the board of directors and key advisors* Oversaw all aspects of technology architecture, performance, and functionality for both consumer-facing and internal applications* Personally developed core backend for maximizing rental inventory utilization, increasing utilization by over 20% * Led development of new features and infrastructure to grow company revenue from a $12M run-rate to a $22M+ run-rate* Grew engineering team from 10 to 25 * Added key new functions to engineering, including SysOps, QA, Project Management, and Recruiting

Grew the engineering team from 2 engineers to 16 engineers in 18 monthsCreated custom, lightweight, software development processes to streamline work of the team, particularly in the areas of code style, code reviews, technical design, project management, knowledge sharing, and mentoringContributed code directly to many products and internal toolsHandled special initiatives as assigned by the COO, such as hiring for engineering-adjacent roles and creating a 3-person customer support team

Led on-site and off-shore engineering teams developing Clickable Pro, a multi-network search advertising management web applicationDesigned and implemented novel recommendation algorithms for optimizing Search Engine Marketing with a focus on small and medium businesses. Successfully demonstrated positive outcomes from more than 90% of recommendations.Grew the U.S.-based engineering team from 0 to 4 developers in 12 monthsRepresented the engineering team to the Board of Directors

Managed multiple engineering project teams with responsibilities in AdWords and AdSenseRecruited and led a 10-engineer team to develop the frontend for Google Ad Manager for Publishers from private beta to public launch (http://www.google.com/admanager)Defined processes for feature qualification, release management, and schedule estimationMentored and developed skills of individual contributors at a variety of experience levels, from fresh college hires through experienced senior engineers

Founded and led projects focused on extracting structured data from the web and providing innovative search applicationsDirected engineering efforts of 6 other individual contributorsLed the launch of Google.com “Q&A” feature, a system which uses facts extracted from the web to provide instant answers to fact seeking search queries. This system currently triggers on approximately 0.5% of Google.com search traffic. More details at http://bit.ly/googleqa.Designed many key systems for extraction, cleansing, and indexing of structured data from the webFiled or co-filed 18 patents for information extraction methods that take advantage of the scale of data available to Google

Managed 3-person team responsible for core analytic and reporting servicesDirected major engineering projects, including re-architecting of core database query servicesOptimized OLAP query engine performance for terabyte-scale datamarts