Objective

• Finding work that thrills me and exploits as much of my experience as possible. I want to keep learning and deliver more successes. I want to make the world more connected, informed, safe, and healthy. I want to make people’s lives more satisfying through knowledge, inspiration, self-improvement and self-expression. 

  I seek challenging experiences and love sharing those experiences with others.

After graduating with a literature degree I moved to San Francisco and became an early explorer of interactive technology and its ability to tell stories. My first business created "Children of the Crane," an experience that educated children about Hiroshima and Japanese culture. In competition with 300+ companies it won one of five grants from Oracle.

I then joined with filmmakers, film festivals, comedians and actors to help tell their stories, designing web experiences alive with personality. With each project I sought collaborators to stretch what could be done with the technology of the time.

This first company was acquired by Ask, which went public. I joined the team and ran the creative group for several years. As the company expanded from consumer to enterprise work I was central to UX, branding, marketing, and product.

Wanting to "get out of the building and talk to real people," I proposed the first UX research projects at the company. These bore fruit as we expanded internationally and needed to understand user needs and behaviors intimately to guide product and marketing decisions. Ask grew to 100 million monthly global visitors and was profitable every quarter I was there. 

Over the years at Ask I kept seeking out new skill sets: reading what the MBAs had read in their courses, delving into the history of advertising, and deepening my understanding of design psychology and user psychology.  All the while working with engineering on natural language search, image search, shopping experiences, and more.

I then joined a startup focused on personalized news, intent on solving the filter bubble challenge that plagues news consumption to this day. After several funding rounds, iCurrent was acquired by the Washington Post.

At the Post our five person startup joined a group of forty-five—innovating on news-related experiences. WaPo Labs took the iCurrent technology to market with a new app called Trove, which received great reviews on launch and grew a steady user community, but eventually was folded into the fast-growing SocialCode.

In late 2014 I decided to travel and develop my photography full-time, a life-long dream. This has been deeply rewarding and now I'm ready to join new teams!