I started out my career studying behavioral economics in college, graduated wanting to keep working in the space but figured that technology was the best place to apply behavioral science for high impact.
I figured that I could continue to learn about behavioral science by reading papers on my own and working with products to apply the insights and see them in action.
For three years, I worked as an independent consultant specializing in behavioral product strategy and gamification. Through product design, I influence user behavior such that users successfully accomplish their goals. At the same time, I worked as the behavioral product strategist for a startup foundry called Spark Wave, doing similar work with their portfolio companies (most notably, GuidedTrack). Over the course of working with over a dozen startups, I repeatedly engaged with onboarding and retention challenges. Continuous onboarding is my specialty.
When I was consulting I would work on multiple projects at once, taking in information from different sources, including papers, meetings, user interviews, Twitter, as well as research from different domains, like behavioral science, game design, and UX. These hypertext graph based tools really helped me make sense of everything and continue to learn from it over the course of a whole career.
I've used Bear, Notion, Roam, Obsidian, and Tana seriously at this point, for between 6-18 months each. I'm passionate about networked tools for thought because they have improved the quality of my work dramatically. Over the course of the last few years, I've built up a following of passionate software users.
August 2021-March 2022, I received a research grant from The Graph Foundation alongside Joel Chan and Brendan Langen to scale synthesis, by researching design affordances and principles for note taking and thought processing software. We surveyed the prior art and interviewed 40 users and builders of tools for thought and wrote about what we learned in a hypertext notebook entitled Scaling Synthesis.
In August 2022 I began work for Tana, a 5th generation tool for thought geared towards advanced relationships, gradual structure, and end-user programming. If you've followed me on Twitter or read Scaling Synthesis, you'll know that's my jam. In mid December, I transitioned to an advisory role due to time zone coordination challenges.
I'm currently open to opportunities, whether it's in product, consulting, or research. I am particularly keen on opportunities that pertain to Scaling Synthesis, my research project on how to build software that enables people to think better with large quantities of information and increasing scales of collaboration.