Hello World

Today both kicks off my website and a journey to share my learnings in this blog. It’s often said that to truly learn something, you should teach it. Thus, for me, this journey is about deepening my own understanding. However, I hope that you, the reader, may benefit from these posts and accelerate towards achieving your life goals.

My Journey So Far

Growing up in a family of engineers, I didn’t fall too far from the tree. I’ve always had a passion for understanding how things work and using that knowledge to make something useful. As a kid, I played with LEGOs, K’Nex, and other building toys. I loved reading science encyclopedias and have fond memories reading my mother’s civil engineering manuals.

It wasn’t until college that the duality of understanding how things work and making something useful really came to light. This motivated me to join Microsoft instead of going to graduate school. This was a shock to my parents, both of whom met in their Ph.D. programs. However, it really shouldn’t have been too surprising as they imparted a moral obligation to use my abilities towards the betterment of society. Both paths offered opportunities to continue that intellectual exploration. Industry offered me a more direct means of impacting the world around me.

I’ve spent in total a decade at Microsoft, interrupted by my first startup, and concluded by current startup. At Microsoft, I worked in Bing, Azure, and Microsoft 365, always attracted to v1 products and intrapreneurship. While it may seem counterintuitive that a company as large as Microsoft supports a startup-like experience, I view the company as a platform to help you deliver the broad impact. One of my career highlights includes pitching a product idea to my VP, getting funding for my own ten-person team, and launching a successful product within Bing.

In 2012, I left Microsoft to build Leafully, an energy data startup funded by the Department of Energy. We helped utilities get value out of the smart grid infrastructure that they built with the 2009 stimulus package.

This year in 2020, I left Microsoft again to found Optrilo, a funded startup helping enterprises forecast and plan their cloud infrastructure.

What to Expect

Each post, I aim to share with you a story or learning that has shaped my life as an engineer, entrepreneur, and father. I’ve been blessed to have many teachers in my life, from great mentors to painful failures. I hope that you may benefit from their wisdom as I have.

In addition to career learnings, I plan on writing about the cloud and data, two themes that has traversed my entire career. Perhaps seeded from starting my career in Bing, I’m incredibly passionate about how the use of data can empower the human experience and help us make better decisions.

Lastly, if you made it this far, thank you for reading and joining me on this journey.