Hi, I'm Dan!
I'm a product leader and general jack-of-all-trades. In various capacities as a product manager, engineer, or designer, I've worked on everything from 1B+-user apps like WeChat, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram to startups like Udacity, Standard Bots, and once, my own.
I grew up in Vermont and began my career as a teen making indie Mac apps (in the pre-App Store days of PayPal and serial numbers). I realized early on how much I derived joy and meaning not just from the deep flow state of building but from the rush of succeeding in solving users' problems and hearing from them. I'd always dreamed of some day of casting off the frigid New England winters and moving to the Bay Area. I've lived here off-and-on since 2009. I currently reside in Oakland, home to beautiful Lake Merritt and among the densest concentrations of hot chicken sandwich joints west of the Mississippi.
I am always open to meeting new people! If you'd like to hang out, find some way to work together, or want hot chicken sandwich recommendations, send me an email or DM!
Things I'm into:
- Robots + AI: I've recently learned a lot about robotics and industrial automation in my work at Standard Bots. I avidly follow research in the space and am planning on going back to school to go deeper into it.
- China: I spent a few years working for Tencent in China and found the perspective of living and working in a foreign country life-changing. During that time, I used to blog and speak about product design trends in China. I've been way less in-the-loop on these things since moving back to the US, but I try to loosely follow Chinese tech and culture. I watch a ton of Chinese movies still.
- Music: I play piano casually and once made one of the first apps for sheet music on the iPad, Etude, which I sold to Steinway & Sons. I love musical theater.
- Running: I run at least a few times every week since I started in my early 20's.
Core beliefs I bring to my work:
- Software as tool: Humans have been tool-makers since prehistoric times. The best apps are those that are not ashamed of being tool-like and utilitarian, of being agency-promoting, not those that try to push users into serving their own goals. They're those that help people accomplish their stated preferences instead of revealing other preferences. You know, the whole "bicycle for the mind" thing, "something we play."
- Reverence for complexity: I have a reverence for the hidden complexity of the world and all of the work that has come from those who worked on a problem before me. For markets, for systems, and for the evolved over the designed. For metis over high-modernism. Nothing is ever as easy as it looks. There are no silver bullets. There is nothing new under the sun. Competitors are never as hapless as they seem. The 80/20 is often not actually the 80/20. Everything lives and dies in the edge cases, in the details, in the margins. Where there is muck, there is brass. Finding ways to simplify things for others is important, but at the end of the day, a matrix chart is worth ten "north star" visions.
- Respect for intuition: The better product organizations I've worked in have demanded rigor in analysis and plans, which has always seemed necessary but not sufficient. The biggest opportunities are always those where the data indicates contradictory things, or the market is moving too fast, or the tradeoffs too complex to navigate. The thesis behind the right move is often non-falsifiable at the time. I've learned to seek these junctures out instead of being afraid of them.
