A Dispatch for the
Nondeterministic Traveler

You’ve arrived, and I have no idea how. This page wasn’t built to be found. It has no distribution strategy, no audience, and a robots.txt written out of genuine hostility toward crawlers. That you’re here at all is either excellent taste or a training set I’d very much like to understand.

I build things. Mostly software, occasionally companies, and, at least once, the kind of AI that made a hedge fund’s existing models feel politely obsolete.

I’ve been at this since high school, when I taught myself Objective-C to build an English-to-Farsi dictionary app. At the time, Farsi NLP was a tragedy. Google Translate was producing sentences that were technically in two languages and comprehensible in neither. If you wanted a Farsi dictionary in your pocket, someone had to build it. So I did. I ran the whole thing on Parse, which Facebook would later acquire and then, in an act of corporate tenderness, shut down entirely[1].

The instinct remains: the thing should exist, so I will make the thing. It’s a philosophy that has governed my life ever since, with varying degrees of financial reward and emotional consequence.

Five years at Google, wandering through more product groups than the Mountain View campus has bicycles. A visual search app acquired by Snap. A crypto venture in Paris, which was exactly as chaotic as it sounds and about which I shall say nothing further. Most recently, I joined Aura Intelligence as its founding CTO, rebuilt the product from the ground up, and ran it until Bain & Company acquired the whole operation in 2025.

Since then, my curiosity has become my full-time occupation. I angel invest, advise founders, and spend an unreasonable number of hours pulling apart vision-language models to see what’s actually under the hood. I’m deep in multimodal infrastructure, robotics, and the tooling that moves us past the chatbot era into systems that actually do things in the world. Some of this becomes a prototype. Some becomes an investment thesis.

But the question I keep circling back to is less technical and more human: what does a software engineer even look like in three years? What does hiring look like when your best candidate might be a founder who can taste product, sell it, and prompt a model into building it? The role isn’t dead. But it’s molting, and most people haven’t noticed yet.

When I’m not deep in a codebase, I am preoccupied with the tactile. The patina on a brass handle. The specific crease in a book’s spine at page 114. The particular, heartbreaking brown a leaf turns in October just before it lets go. Nobody is waiting for my report on autumn leaves, and yet here we are.

I sit on the Young Collectors Council at the Guggenheim, though I suspect I take skiing more seriously than almost anything else. I have a burgeoning, perhaps unhealthy, attachment to vintage alpine culture, a project I’m currently manifesting into a publication called Chalant Society. I’ve never once managed to keep a hobby from becoming a project. It’s a character flaw I’ve learned to embrace[2].

If you’re building something, I’d love to hear about it. If you’ve read this far without building anything at all, I’m touched. You could have been anywhere else on the internet. Instead you’re here, reading a letter from a stranger who is genuinely delighted by the improbability of the whole thing[3].

Do come back. The door is always slightly open[4].