Iterate again.
I'm a UX designer in San Francisco. I've spent fifteen years on the distance between how software works and how people think — most of it at Google, and the first stretch of it building something from nothing.
I started in 2011 by building VacationCandy.com, a vacation rental site. We didn't know how to do any of it. You learn the backend because the site has to run. You learn to design a logo because the site doesn't have one. You learn what people actually want by watching them get confused and fixing it. Most of what I know I learned about a week after I'd already built it. I've never really stopped working that way.
From there I booped around a few different startups — the kind where every pixel is a bet on whether the company survives — before landing at Google in 2016. In November that'll be ten years: Assistant, Fi, Shopping, and now agentic commerce.
The most impactful thing a human can do is reduce the inefficiency of something.
That's the whole job, as far as I'm concerned. The inefficiency of using a website. The inefficiency of working out whether to trust a brand. Each one is a small tax on somebody's day, and taking it off makes their life fractionally better. Do that at the scale of a billion queries and the fractions stop being small.
It also scales the other way, for me personally. The more exciting the work, the more ambitious I get — and the more ambitious I get, the more motivated I am to keep going.
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2011
VacationCandy.com
Founded a vacation rental website. Designed it, built it, learned everything the hard way.
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Then
A few startups
Fast, scrappy, high-stakes. Core product experience where every decision counted.
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2016
Google
Ten years this November. Assistant, Google Fi, Shopping, and the agentic commerce work I'm leading now.
See the work →
I want to build a robot factory.
Early days, and I'm having the time of my life. Ask me in a year.