Pangea

Hiring is still very broken. But one thing that makes humans unique as a species is our ability to form teams, collaborate, and work together — it goes back to our foundational evolution, and I believe it's going to remain foundational to who we are. I wanted to make it easier to create opportunities for people to work together, particularly in creative, marketing, and growth fields — areas where you need creative minds focused on what humans do well, and increasingly, people who really understand how to wield AI to get things done.

The old model — join a company, stay for 20 or 30 or 40 years — has already gone away for most people. We live in an environment where people want to try different things, progress, and have multiple projects in their lives. The internet enabled that shift, and AI is accelerating it. Right now, I personally run three different projects with nine active work streams across them. People can get a lot more done in a lot less time, and that's why fractional work and contract-to-hire models are rising. It's also smarter: work with someone part-time to see if there's a long-term fit before committing to a full-time W-2 hire. And while the dream of a one-person billion-dollar company is compelling, the reality is that you're going to need teams of two or three or ten or twenty. Organizations might cap out at 100 or 200 employees instead of 10,000, but so long as you're building products with real complexity, you'll need to keep assembling great people. Great teams build great products. If we can help assemble great teams, we can enable more great products to exist in the world.

Pangea's evolution mirrors my own professional progression — learning to hire well, learning to build, and ultimately wanting to work on multiple things at once. We went from a college-focused mobile app to a professional fractional marketplace, and from handing out rubber ducks on campuses to working with companies hiring experienced AI-native talent across 150+ countries. Each phase forced us to rethink what we were building and who we were building it for. The constant through all of it was the same conviction: the way people find and form teams is changing, and there should be a platform designed for how work actually happens now.

Pangea is now the first AI-native staffing and recruiting platform, focused on fractional creative, marketing, and growth talent. We've built an entire native experience from top of funnel all the way through to matching and payment. Our agentic matching system connects companies with high-quality talent, and we facilitate contracts and payments through the platform. We're building our own series of internal AI agents to manage operations as we scale — automating the coordination layer so we can focus on what matters: the quality of the match.

I built out our entire data engineering architecture personally — dbt transformations, data warehousing with BigQuery, and reverse ETL pipelines that activate our data for marketing workflows and operational automation. On top of that, we've layered BI dashboards and hundreds of automations that keep the marketplace running efficiently. Now, with my technical abilities continuing to grow, I'm not only contributing on the sales and customer experience side but pushing new code and features directly to production. It's a different kind of CEO role — one where I'm talking to customers and managing service issues in the morning and shipping code in the afternoon.

We've grown the platform to over $5 million in GMV and reached cash flow break-even. The economics of the business have improved substantially since our college marketplace days — larger contracts, more meaningful margins, and a clear path to long-term sustainability. We've gone from a scrappy student project to a real business with the option to become one of the first truly agentic-first hiring platforms. That's what we're actively building toward right now.

Everything. I own the P&L, led fundraising, and set the strategic direction. But what makes my role unusual is how hands-on it's stayed. I've built the data infrastructure, managed customer relationships directly, developed the automation layer, and now — thanks to AI coding tools — I'm shipping production code alongside the engineering team. I talk directly to our customers, manage service issues, and push features to production, often in the same day. It's the kind of role that only works if you genuinely want to understand every layer of the business, and I do.