About Chris

The Short

Wandering technologist and generally curious person.

The Work

I'm a veteran product leader with hands on experience across product, design, engineering, and analytics.

I've also led teams in marketing and merchandising, worked in M&A, brought products from 0 to 1, founded a business, and started a local chapter of an unconference. I've consulted for large and storied organizations in law and finance, as well as for venture backed startups and bootstrapped software providers.

The Long

This is more a story for me to make sense of my life, but maybe it'll be interesting to you too. You can find more details in my logs, or a sense of where it all lead in my beliefs page.

Early Life

I built my first website in the 90s and have been doing all things digital ever since.

In high school I took a liking to video (A/V club), thought I might be a screenwriter for awhile in college, won some art scholarship for a perverted looking video installation, and took graphic design and theatre lighting classes for fun. I also started a screenprinting business with a friend. We designed and printed shirts and sold them door to door in freshman dorms, on the quad, and did some some custom work for campus organizations as well.

Product & Practical MBA

Out of college I joined Custom Ink in operations. I didn't know product management was even a career field until I was encouraged to apply for a role. I got the role and ramped up on software delivery, and UX design, and graduated from HTML/CSS to web application engineering. SQL, and R, and cohort analysis came next. Then I swapped all that out for financial models and business development, and swapped once again for marketing and messaging and merchandising. I'm at my best climbing steep curves, and get bored easily.

Entrepreneurship & Travel

So then I traveled the globe and sold tennis bags. Luckily those two were only tangentially related -- Amazon handled shipping the tennis bags so I could travel with just a duffle and a backpack. I ran the business from a laptop, visited our manufacturing facility in China, and used my mother's sewing machine to prototype new products. I hiked a lot and ate a lot until I got tired of those things and settled in Mexico City.

CDMX and Software Development

I met my wife there in CDMX and enjoyed the beautiful covid calm of an otherwise chaotic city. My business had stalled and then collapsed with supply chain issues so I started working full time in software engineering. I did that for a few years but it wasn't particularly fulfilling, largely due to the roles I landed in. No complaints about the people or places, just weren't great fits for my needs.

Van Life

So I bought a cargo van and learned carpentry and electrical and how to swear a lot when things go wrong and how to power through anyway. And I built a camper van. We went from Mexico City to the tip of Prince Edward Island and back down to the pacific shores of Mexico. Then to the tip of the Yucatan and back up to the Canadian Rockies and back around to NY and back down to Vericruz, Mexico. And plenty else in between. Someday that'll all get added to the logs.

Now

And now we're here, together, reading and writing this rambling bio. You can see what I'm focused on right now.