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 at the Virgin Megastore Times Square. It was the most pivotal weekend of my life up to that point.
For the next four years, I was glued to hacker channels on IRC. Firewalls, packet filters, honeypots. Traceroute'd and nmap'd all over the place.
This bedroom hacker's dream opportunity come true!
Distributed Systems with Robert Morris, Computer & Network Security with Ron Rivest, Operating Systems, Microcontroller Lab. Signals & Systems changed the way I understand just about everything.
If it's not apparent from how I spent my high school years, I was deeply interested in computer security at this point. I continued to pursue that in college, working at MIT IS&T's network security, and interning at Mazu Networks working on traffic profiling. I also did a bit of research in that arena, finishing up my time at MIT doing my master's thesis at Lincoln Laboratory.
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.
I ultimately chose not to pursue information security as a career, and the then-dormant startup ecosystem simply was not on my radar. I was not entirely sure what I wanted to do, but I knew where I wanted to be—New York. I chose to follow the lion's share of my classmates into the then-booming finance industry.
Bridgewater was my first gig out of school. I worked with lots of great people on some compelling projects, and learned a ton about markets and the global economy. This was a singular place and a very special experience that I wouldn't trade for anything. But it eventually became clear this world was not for me.
Worked on trading engines in Bridgewater's Account Management department, the group responsible for translating views on markets to trades that need execution. I rewrote the algorithms within Bridgewater's portfolio construction and transaction cost optimization process. This engine sat at the center of Bridgewater's trading pipeline, generating billions of dollars of orders for execution by the trading department. I also built an equity option hedging engine.
Shifted from building the systems to understanding what they were optimizing for. Portfolio analytics, monitoring and analyzing client strategic beta portfolios.
Having dropped out of the finance industry, I turned to figuring out what was next. I wanted to stay in New York, but all the opportunities were finance-related. The financial crisis was just beginning to unfold, and the city's tech ecosystem was nascent to say the least. Unsure what to do, I was dabbling in audio software on the iPhone for the first time (the App Store had just opened). And then I heard about some MIT kids raising a Series A for Dropbox. I talked to my old friend Drew about the whole fundraising thing. The conversation quickly shifted to coming to Dropbox to work on the iPhone client. A new green field to run in. I was immediately excited. It wasn't long before I packed my bags for San Francisco.
Led mobile engineering from zero to 100 million users over five and a half years. First author of the iOS client. Led every iOS and Android release for five years. Led partnerships product and engineering with Samsung and HTC, distributing the Android client to over 100 million phones. Designed and built Dropbox's first third-party developer APIs. Multiple patents. Managed up to ten engineers.
After Dropbox, I shifted gears into reconnecting with passions in music, signal processing, and embedded computing. This was my pendulum swing away from intensive startup life.
Founded Humble Audio and shipped the Quad Operator — A new take on frequency modulation synthesis for eurorack modular. The module features a one-control-per-function interface, offering the opportunity to gain a deeper intuition for how FM parameters affect results. Hardware, firmware, DSP, product design, and all the rest.
When I started making music with Ableton Live in my 20s, it was clear I was more interested in how the audio processing worked than in the actual music making. Screen fatigue was extreme—I had zero desire to sit in front of a computer after work, and lots of creative folks I talked to felt the same way. My Dropbox years gave me an immense appreciation for the challenge of making tools for users, not just doing slick engineering. I wanted to put those skills toward something I loved dearly—music. It was my opportunity to have an influence on the music I couldn't make myself. Tool-making with DSP & hardware became the way.
Resolved some tricky resource management issues in Output's Arcade 2.0.
Building on the Quad Operator, I started on a full-featured tabletop instrument. Hands down the most ambitious engineering project I've taken on solo (although I phoned a friend or two). The hardware: Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 with five MCUs, an audio CODEC, capacitive touch sensing, and LED driving across the chip network. The software: careful Linux kernel tuning, device drivers, real-time audio DSP. I solved lots of hard problems and the prototype got fun to use. But hardware is hard, there was a ton of work left on the table, and I was working mostly solo and needing a change. That work has been shelved—for now. The FM synth at the bottom of this page adapts some of this unreleased work.
When it became clear it was time to get savvier about machine learning, I took a few weeks of time for 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 this documentary telling the story of Bronx-born disco legend Richie Weeks' journey to reclaim control of his copyrights.
Although I haven't pursued it extensively, I have enjoyed a couple of opportunities to give perspective to folks building companies at the early stages. If you think you might find my perspective of value to you, reach out below.
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.
Recently, I'm requiting my passion for information security, networked computer systems, and cryptography.
Exploring applications of fully homomorphic encryption. FHE enables computation on encrypted data. An academic thread for many years, it's now becoming practical for production environments. Let's get creative! What shall we build with it?
Conway's Game of Life running entirely over CKKS fully homomorphic encryption. The server calculates on encrypted board states and incorporates encrypted inputs from browser client. 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.