New York & Scaling Pangea

I moved to New York in 2023. I'm from the area originally, and after six years in Providence it was time for a change. The company had shifted to working more remotely, so my location was less tied to where the team sat. What drew me to New York was the density of the founder ecosystem. I'd begun to realize how much it mattered to be around other smart, ambitious people — and New York just has more of them by sheer gravity. The energy there is different. You're constantly running into people building interesting things, and that proximity shapes how you think and what you think is possible.

As Pangea matured, the team became increasingly remote and global. We moved away from needing everyone in one place and started hiring based on talent, not geography — which, for a company building a global talent marketplace, felt like the right way to practice what we preached. Managing a distributed team taught me a lot about communication, trust, and the importance of clear systems. You can't rely on hallway conversations when your team is spread across time zones. Everything needs to be more intentional.

The New York chapter coincided with Pangea's biggest strategic shift. We moved from being a campus-oriented marketplace — college students hiring college students — to a professionally oriented fractional marketplace focused on AI-native talent. The users we wanted to serve weren't undergrads anymore; they were experienced professionals building with new tools, and there were more of them in cities like New York than on college campuses. The platform expanded to talent in over 150 countries. It was a fundamentally different business than what we'd started with in that Brown accelerator, but the core thesis was the same: connect great people with great work, and make the process as frictionless as possible.

New York has an incredible density of founders, but that density can actually work against you. The community gets diluted. There are thousands of people in the very early stages of building something, and finding the ones who've raised venture funding, gone through programs like YC, have real customers and revenue and serious ambitions — that takes effort. My friends Akash and Mike and I saw an opportunity to cultivate something more intentional. We started the NYC Founders Club as a curated community of founders we genuinely wanted to spend time with — people operating at a similar level, focused on real-life connection rather than another Slack group. We built it to our own tastes and standards: intimate dinners, meaningful collisions, a space where ambitious people could be honest with each other. It turned into something I care about as much as Pangea.