Who I Am
I’m a reflective practitioner who believes in transparent leadership. What’s written here formalizes my thinking and helps others understand how I approach work and life. This aligns with one of my core principles: Be who I am 100% of the time—what you see is what you get.
Understanding My Leadership Style
Throughout my career, I’ve gained insight into my leadership approach through feedback and assessment tools. Early DISC assessments identified me as highly directive, though I’ve observed these profiles evolve over time. A later Insights/Myers-Briggs assessment identified me as a “directing motivator”—a profile that reflects how I’ve learned to balance strategic vision with team empowerment.
Organization isn’t my natural strength, so I’ve developed an approach that leverages clear strategic direction and carefully applied processes to achieve high throughput. This allows me to focus on productivity while minimizing unnecessary friction in team settings.
As part of an end-of-year reflection exercise using Year Compass, I began articulating my personal principles more deliberately. Having seen the value of clear principles in team settings, I realized I should apply the same rigor to my own decision-making. Ray Dalio’s principles workbook provided a useful framework for this exercise.
My Values
My core values center on creating something new—I thrive at the edge where innovation happens, whether that’s building new technology, scoping projects, or establishing teams positioned for success.
Helping others is equally fundamental. I’ve been fortunate to receive guidance throughout my career, and I find genuine satisfaction in helping others reach breakthrough moments. This usually involves helping people think through complex problems or connecting the right individuals and teams.
Building a thriving family grounds everything else. I’m deeply invested in setting my children up for success, recognizing they’ll likely have a greater impact on the world than I will.
Beyond these core values, I’m pragmatic about career trajectory. I don’t need to be CEO of a large company—I’d rather be a significant contributor to something meaningful than a small part of something massive. I’m comfortable with discomfort; when things feel too “safe,” it’s usually a sign I’m not learning the right things. My close network is deliberately small, and I tend to prioritize execution and impact over universal approval.
My Principles
These principles guide my decision-making in professional and personal contexts:
On Time Investment
On Authenticity
On Learning
Always Understand Why
I’m skeptical of “busy work.” The hardest work isn’t activity—it’s understanding why we need to act.
In a work context, this aligns with what I call “the red thread” principle: every piece of work should ladder up to team mission, organizational goals, and ultimately company strategy. Articulating this connection drives bottom-up alignment and enables truly autonomous teams. When work doesn’t fit the red thread, it signals either incomplete strategy (worth exploring) or misallocated effort.
I’ve found Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt useful for strategy formulation, Amplitude’s North Star Framework helpful for thinking across time horizons, and John Cutler’s writing invaluable for product thinking. Amazon’s working backwards process, outlined in Shipping Greatness, is the most effective approach I’ve found for maintaining focus on “why.”
Invest Time to Maximize the Long Term
I experiment and explore, but my long-term goal is building sustainable income streams that don’t require constant attention. I’m not looking to build the next Google or Apple—I’d rather create the digital equivalent of my grandparents’ business: something that generates value with minimal ongoing input, allowing me to invest time in family and their pursuits.
Invest Continually in Family
One of my weaknesses is not spending enough time understanding others—I’m naturally execution-focused. While this may be acceptable in work contexts, family is permanent.
I ensure I always have shared activities with my children. This isn’t about simply engaging with their interests (video games and YouTube), but helping them discover and invest in their passions while joining them for part of that journey.
Be Who I Am 100% of the Time
I don’t have the energy to be someone I’m not. I adapt to situations appropriately, but the underlying person remains constant. This principle matters because I believe optimal outcomes require trust, and authenticity is the fastest path to building it.
I struggle with pausing long enough to truly get to know people, but being consistently myself reduces the barrier that familiarity typically removes.
All Dimensions Matter
I’ve observed two critical trios in my work:
- Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose
- People, Product, and Technology
I’ve historically over-indexed on Purpose and Product. My focus on “why” naturally pulls me to strategy, while my bias toward action assumes the other dimensions will resolve themselves. Experience has shown this isn’t true.
Autonomy may not be within your control, particularly in dysfunctional organizations. Building the necessary trust may require alignment several levels above your direct leadership.
Mastery is at risk when purpose is clear but execution standards or ways of working are inadequate. I align strongly with mission-focused cross-functional teams where inter-team communication overhead is minimized. I find functionally-split organizations challenging.
Similarly, over-focusing on Product can blind you to technical debt that makes velocity impossible, or to fundamental misalignment in senior leadership philosophy. As a leader, it’s impossible to be authentic if your organization doesn’t share your core values. Don’t make excuses for organizational inadequacies—we all have enough of our own to address.
Seek Out Truth Seekers
I’ve learned that my urge to move fast is naturally complemented by people who move more deliberately. I believe their caution helps me, and I help them move forward faster.
I seek out experts who share knowledge accessibly and hold themselves to high standards. They’re diverse and excel in different areas—technology, science, product, project management, people. Often they don’t fully recognize their own strengths.
My expectation is that they’ll defend their positions with backbone. I hope the challenge I provide strengthens their convictions, and together we make better decisions.
Fail Fast, Repeat Mindfully
Personality assessments have consistently identified me as “high red” on the DISC profile. While this has softened over time, early assessments put me in company with notably directive leaders.
I’ve observed a failure mode in high-red personalities: “We tried that and it didn’t work.” While this seems like good pattern recognition, many fast attempts aren’t thought through adequately. This doesn’t mean over-analyzing—doing is often the best discovery. But when attempts fail, we should identify specific failure modes and iterate deliberately rather than categorically avoiding that approach.
Stop, Reflect, and Explicitly Redirect
I naturally position myself toward learning opportunities based on what feels right or addresses current challenges. This intuitive approach often works well, but sometimes the learning I anticipated doesn’t materialize, or I need to learn something entirely different.
For significant changes, I now force myself to consider multiple paths before choosing one. This isn’t about ignoring intuition—it’s about ensuring my choices are fully conscious and rational.
This matters for two reasons:
Natural growth and path changes: My interests evolve. Early in my career, I deeply enjoyed coding, but once I felt I’d mastered it, I lost interest. I moved to machine learning, then to using ML to build products, then to leading teams that define product success and ship ML products. Each area is engaging, but as I plan my next evolution, it’s worth reflecting on “where am I headed” rather than just “where am I now.”
You’re learning a different lesson than you signed up for: Often when we make changes, the actual learning differs from expectations. This isn’t necessarily bad, but it requires recognition and decision. With forethought and second-order thinking, these surprises become less jarring. When facing unexpected learning, I ask: “Is this the learning I want?” and “How can I extract maximum value from this situation?”
Current Focus Areas
I maintain several ongoing objectives that guide my personal and professional development:
Purpose: Deliberately exploring potential 5-year focus areas while eliminating paths that don’t align with where I can create meaningful impact.
Connection: Developing or deepening shared interests with each of my five children and my partner—creating anchors we can always return to, much as my parents gave me swimming, cooking, aviation, and science.
Mastery: Building tangible projects that challenge me to work with my hands and think in new ways, reconnecting with the maker mindset that initially drew me to technology.
Mind & Body: Maintaining routines that support mental clarity and physical health, building on established habits like sea swimming and cycling while continuing to refine practices that sustain long-term performance.