I was raised and still live in Austin, Texas with my wife Holly (for any locals, we began dating at McCallum High), our corgi Turbo, and our cat Florence Mew. We're rabid Alamo Drafthouse fans, and spend a lot of our time watching film either there or at home. I'm a big horror film nerd and have a very active Letterboxd where I try to review every film I watch. I'm a poor tinkerer, and have a distinct love for vintage film cameras (more on that later), and bad cars.
My wife and I have built a few successful local businesses in the past 10 years - I helped her start a wedding photography business after we graduated college, and proceeded to shoot every wedding with her for 8+ years. The interpersonal and economic dynamics of wedding photography are fascinating; functionally working a weekend job where patrons regard you as a service professional, as a reprieve from my professional experience in technology, was an interesting exercise in humility in addition to the innate creativity.
In January of 2023, we had the idea to begin running a one-hour, 35mm photo lab out of our home. We took six months to plan the logistics and build the operational foundation of the business, and two months to practice once we had the equipment. We launched in October of 2023, and by January 2024 it had become Holly's full-time job, and by April we had a six-figure run-rate and are scrambling to figure out how to keep up with the demand.
While I don't participate in the day-to-day of the business, I spend my weekends planning for growth, investigating new revenue streams, building new customer-facing workflows, and tuning our operational efficiency. You can read a writeup of one project I'm especially proud of here.
Much like wedding photography, having a constant lens into a retail-style interaction offers a really amazing juxtaposition to my time spent in a corporate context. I feel very fortunate to have the opportunity to code-switch between thinking about problems related to millions of dollars in revenue and efficiency (Cloudflare) and problems related to increasing profit margins by $.20 per customer because of unexpected operational loss (film lab). It's forced me to think about every problem differently, and with a pretty unique perspective.
To try to provide a well-rounded sense for me, here's an assortment of writeups of things I'd rank as my bigger accomplishments both personally and professionally.
Feel free to reach out to me via email or follow me on social media.