I didn't plan to become a designer.

I was studying international relations at Brown, trying to figure out how the world worked at a systems level, when a problem landed in front of me: buying and selling stuff between college students was a mess. So my co-founder and I built Zaar — a thrift marketplace for college students — from scratch. Six weeks to MVP, an interview with Y Combinator, and a crash course in what it actually means to design something people need.

That's still how I approach every project. Find the real problem. Map the whole system. Then figure out what to build.

I've been designing professionally since 2020 — healthcare platforms, fintech products, and for the past year and a half, complex enterprise software at Storable. The through-line isn't the industry, it's the type of problem: messy, cross-functional, with more edge cases than anyone accounted for.

Lately I've been using AI to close the gap between what I can design and what I can ship. I think the designer who can build is going to be the most interesting person in the room for the next decade, and I'd like to be that person.

Outside of work I'm probably traveling somewhere, playing with my dog, or making an argument that Austin has better breakfast tacos than wherever you're from.