About
The long way in
I lead engineering teams at Pinterest now, but I didn't take the standard route here. I came into tech sideways, by building something of my own first — and the years before the formal titles taught me as much about product, systems, and ownership as anything since.
Origin story
Building before I had the title
Before I became an engineering leader, I built and ran 3gforfree.com: a mobile ringtone and customization business that started as a page for coworkers and grew into my full-time work for most of my twenties.
I was working at Sprint in the early mobile-web era. Coworkers wanted ringtones and screensavers for their phones, so I worked out how to deliver content to a flip phone and stood up a site on a computer at my parents' house. They passed the link to customers, traffic grew, and a favor turned into a business.
I built both halves of it: the web experience and a separate mobile site, with device detection that fingerprinted each phone so it only got content it could actually play. This was before cloud infrastructure made scaling a button you press, so growth meant solving performance and operational problems the hard way. It was also a crash course in business — customer demand, product iteration, music and content rights, and what it means to own a whole system when that system is just you.
Eventually the carriers and platforms absorbed ringtone distribution, the market moved, and I moved with it, into formal engineering roles. The path in was winding. But 3gforfree is where most of my instincts were formed.
What it taught me
- Customer instinct. I found the product by standing next to the people who wanted it.
- Product instinct. An off-hand favor turned into a self-serve product.
- Technical grit. I learned by building, debugging, scaling, and operating under real load.
- Scrappiness. No playbook and no modern tooling — you solve the problem or it breaks.
- Resilience. When the market shifted under me, I shifted with it.
Since then
The formal years
Everything after 3gforfree has been more conventional: engineering roles, then management, at Disney, NBC, Netflix, Spotify, and now Pinterest. The titles changed; the foundation held. I still lead by staying close to the people we build for, favoring practical systems over clever ones, working through ambiguity, and owning the outcome.
The full record, roles and dates, lives on LinkedIn →