What I’m building
Sandbox Labs AI is my builder practice. Agentic systems, machine commerce, open-web infrastructure. I build the thing before I write about it. The writing comes from the build.
I stay honest about where the work sits. I’m exploring agentic patterns, MCP-integrated, working toward hierarchical orchestration. Not autonomous agents in production. That line matters to the people I work with, and they notice when it’s missing.
Daily in Claude Code and Codex. Multi-model orchestration, where disagreement between models is signal, not noise. Apps running in production on open protocols. 150+ articles working these ideas out in public.
How I got here
The pattern repeats every cycle. A new capability arrives, most of the talk around it is noise, a small part is real. I’ve gotten reasonably good at telling them apart, mostly by standing at the front of the thing and building with it instead of reading about it.
PayPal. Developer and startup relations. I ran the North American rollout of the Startup Blueprint program and mentored more than 300 startups into the payment stack. Partnerships with 25+ incubators and accelerators. BattleHack, a global hackathon series. Geeks on a Plane through Latin America with 500 Startups. The job was simple to describe, hard to do well: get developers building on the platform, and make the platform worth building on.
American Express. Developer relations and innovation programs, in the Valley. I co-produced the Creative Currency hackathon, scouted startups that needed real payment infrastructure, and lectured at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco on what came out of it. Same pattern as PayPal. Meet builders where they are, translate between them and a large institution that needs their energy. Translation between builders and institutions is still most of what I do.
Blockchain University. I founded it in 2014 and ran it, mostly alone, for sixteen months. Cohorts in Mountain View, at PwC, IDEO, Singularity University, Microsoft Reactor. Faculty to Japan and India. 300+ alumni who went on to start 60+ ventures and land at Coinbase, Ripple, Google, the SF Fed. Scholarships for women in the field, which mattered then and matters now. It was a startup pretending to be a school. Always pivoting, always one cohort from running out of room. The instinct to stand at the front of a new technology and bring people in arrived early. It hasn’t left.
In between and since, the same work across cycles. Blockchain consulting at UN Women. A Hyperledger MOOC for the Linux Foundation that reached 150,000+ learners. Teaching at Keio and the University of Amsterdam. Early community building around Bluesky and decentralized social. Different technology each time. Same job.
How I work
Honest framing is the whole method. With a technical audience it’s the only thing that holds up. I’d rather name the limits of what I’ve built than oversell it.
I run an adversarial check on my own conclusions. Primary analysis, then pressure-test it against other models, then treat the places they disagree as the most useful output. I look for my own error before I defend it.
Writing
150+ articles, mostly on LinkedIn, working these ideas out in public.
In the room
I host and join builder gatherings around agentic AI and open protocols. A recent one at True Ventures in SF. The format is always the same. Fewer slides, more building.
A little more
Before any of the technology, there was movement. I trained as a dancer and choreographer, studied figure drawing in New York and piano in Cuba, won a choreography award as a teenager and kept performing through art school. The path from there to here is less strange than it sounds. Both are about reading a room without words, holding a complex idea until it’s clear enough to show someone else, and standing up in front of people to make something land. I translate for a living now. I learned how on a stage.
Education
NYU, Tisch School of the Arts, BFA, Dance
Indiana University, BA, Choreography
UC Berkeley, Haas School of Business, Venture Capital Executive Program
Stanford Continuing Studies, UC Berkeley Extension, Business Administration
Recent: Anthropic (Model Context Protocol, AI Fluency), AWS Certified AI Practitioner, Google Cloud Generative AI Leader, Box Certified AI Professional