I am currently the CTO at Branch International – a startup providing financial services to millions of customers in emerging markets. At Branch, I lead the Engineering & Data Science team, which is a globally distributed team of roughly 35 team members, spanning 3 continents.

Prior to Branch, I was a co-founder and CTO at Rep, a startup focused on revolutionizing how customers communicate with businesses via messaging. We were funded by Accel, First Round, and others, and helped brands such as M.Gemi, M.M.LaFleur, and Timbuk2 deliver a superb customer experience. We were acquired by Stripe in 2018.

Before Rep, I spent a number of years at Google, where I built YouTube’s Recommendation and Personalization teams from the ground up. During my time at YouTube the homepage’ traffic grew to hundreds of millions of monthly active users and billions of daily views. Our work on the recommendation system was honored with a Technology Emmy Award in 2014 and we also published multiple papers and patents on our work. Prior to YouTube I also worked on Google Search Ranking & Infrastructure, and various other large-scale recommendation systems.

Outside of work, I’m a huge nerd, fitness enthusiast, and family man. I like to spend time with my wife and three sons, try my hands at new recipes in the kitchen or dabble in photography or writing. More recently, I’ve also become interested in chess, mostly playing blitz and rapid on lichess.org. If there’s any time left in the day, I might go for a run, play tennis, or squeeze in a workout at home.