🚧 Under Construction 🚧
Entrepreneur-in-Residence, 0xPARC
Past: MIT S.B. & M.Eng., EECS · Bridgewater Associates · Early Dropbox · Humble Audio
My family moved to the Philadelphia area. I didn't know anyone and I was already hooked on computers. I spent most of the summer installing Slackware over and over again. OpenBSD came later. Countless hours configuring and recompiling kernels, struggling to get dial-up working with minicom and pppd. Different times.
New York City. Attended 2600 Magazine's Beyond HOPE conference. Bought Daft Punk's Homework and Roni Size / Reprazent's New Forms at the Virgin Megastore. This was probably the single weekend that computers and music hooked me for life.
Once it all worked, I was glued to hacker channels on IRC. Firewalls, packet filters, honeypots. Traceroute'd and nmap'd all over the place.
Studied computer science and engineering — undergrad through master's. Distributed systems with Robert Morris, security with Rivest, operating systems with Kaashoek, microcomputer project lab soldering at 2am. The curriculum said engineering but the education was learning that computation could be a medium, not just a tool.
Wi-Fi threat analysis for MIT's network infrastructure. Deep packet inspection and protocol analysis at Mazu Networks. Adversarial research at CSAIL that got published at NDSS and adopted by OpenSSH. A master's thesis on delegation of authority at Lincoln Lab. Four continuous years where the job was to think like an attacker.
Co-authored "Inoculating SSH Against Address Harvesting" with Schechter, Jung, and McLain at MIT and Lincoln Laboratory — countermeasures adopted by OpenSSH and a major commercial SSH vendor.
M.Eng thesis: Towards a Deployable Framework for Delegation of Authority in Network Applications — fine-grained delegation of authority, dynamic library interposition, security protocol design. Advised by Stuart Schechter & Hari Balakrishnan.
Built mission-critical transaction cost optimization module for the alpha trading platform — dynamic programming-based optimization for billions in daily trades. Built options trading and hedging engine. The kind of place where your code either works or someone notices very quickly.
Portfolio analytics, monitoring and analyzing client strategic beta portfolios. Moved from building the systems to understanding what they were optimizing for.
Led mobile engineering from zero to a hundred million users over five and a half years. First author of the iOS client. Led every iOS and Android release for five years. Led engineering and product for partnerships with Samsung and HTC — a hundred million phones. Co-designed the first third-party developer APIs. Multiple patents. Managed up to ten engineers.
Joined when the company was nine people and stayed through the arc to over a thousand. Most people have either early-stage or at-scale experience. Having both — watching the same codebase, the same product, the same team go through that entire transformation — teaches you things that neither phase teaches alone.
Somewhere during all of this, synthesis became the thing that ate every spare hour. The overlap between signal processing and software engineering started to feel less like a hobby and more like a trajectory. Building the instrument — designing the thing that makes the sound — turned out to be more interesting than any software product.
Founded Humble Audio and shipped the Quad Operator — a four-operator FM synthesizer for eurorack modular. Open internal modulation matrix, WYSIWYG interface. Hardware, firmware, DSP, product design.
Designing tools for musicians means designing for how creativity actually works — messy, iterative, non-linear. The instrument has to be deep enough to reward years of exploration but immediate enough that the first five minutes feel like music, not homework. Every knob placement is a bet about what someone will reach for in the middle of a performance.
Engineering consulting for other companies, including Output's Arcade 2.0.
Built a custom synthesizer around a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 with five MCUs, an audio CODEC, capacitive touch sensing, and LED driving across the chip network. Linux kernel tuning, device drivers, real-time audio DSP at the hardware level. Solved hard problems up and down the stack and realized a compelling prototype. But hardware is hard, and made the decision not to complete the project. The FM synth running at the bottom of this page is a browser adaptation of that unreleased work.
Two rounds of Deep Learning for Music Information Retrieval at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. VAEs for timbre, DDSP for differentiable synthesis, transformers for sequence modeling. Where the audio work meets the ML world.
Co-executive produced a documentary, now streaming on Resident Advisor.
In-venue streaming technology directly from the front-of-house mixing desk. Advised Ann Marie and Michael in the early days pinning down their technical leadership.
Mentored CTO Amol Kapoor as he stepped out of doing engineering into leading engineering.
Entrepreneur-in-Residence in San Francisco. Exploring applications of fully homomorphic encryption — computation on encrypted data without ever decrypting it. This is the current home base.
Contributed to 0xPARC's encrypted game of life: Conway's Game of Life running entirely over fully homomorphic encryption. The server never sees the board state. The kind of project that makes you reconsider what computation can be.
FM SYNTH is a simple 6-operator frequency modulation synthesizer with capabilities similar to the Yamaha DX7. This is a demo-grade adaptation of unreleased Humble Audio work.
Synthesis implementation is WASM-compiled Rust. Audio-reactive generative backgrounds in WebGPU.
Special thanks to Claude for coding assistance and musical stylings.