Upbringing

I grew up in the suburbs of New York City, the only boy in a house with four sisters. From an early age I was drawn to making things — not in the "lemonade stand" way people usually mean when they say a kid was entrepreneurial, but through a camera lens. I got a video camera in sixth grade and was immediately hooked. I'd spend weekends learning manual settings, recruiting friends to make short films, and uploading everything to YouTube right as the platform was taking off. One of those videos crossed a million views — it's since been taken down, but at the time it was a glimpse of something I couldn't fully articulate yet: the ability to take a vision and turn it into something real.

Film became my first medium for that instinct. In high school, I founded the filmmaking club, and when I realized there was no formal class for it, I petitioned the administration to create one. They agreed, hired a graduate from RISD to teach it, and — fifteen years later — she's still there, now teaching four levels of videography. It was a small thing, but it taught me something I've carried ever since: just because a system is set up a certain way doesn't mean it can't be changed. That lesson — that you can reshape the structures around you, not just work within them — became a recurring thread in everything I did after.

Growing up the only boy with four sisters meant I had to carve out my own space. I love them, but we were into different things — I was the one snowboarding, playing paintball, and drumming while they had their own worlds. But being part of a big family taught me things I didn't fully appreciate until later: compromise, emotional intelligence, how to read a room. When six people are making decisions together, you learn to make space for others while still creating space for yourself. If you wanted to be heard, you had to find your voice — not by being the loudest, but by having something worth saying. That dynamic — coexisting, collaborating, advocating for your perspective without steamrolling — turns out to be pretty good training for building companies and communities.

I still think of myself as a creative, even though I haven't picked up a camera in years. What videography really taught me was that you can make things — and you can make things that other people genuinely enjoy. That feeling never went away. It just found new mediums: a marketplace, a community, a product. Somewhere in those early years I established a KPI that I've never really let go of — the number of smiles you can generate in the world. It sounds soft for someone who went through Y Combinator and builds software, but it's the through-line connecting everything: the films I made in middle school, the class I convinced my high school to create, and every product I've shipped since. Vision into action, in service of something people actually want.