I've spent the last fifteen years helping complex and risk-averse organizations innovate new products and services, then building the teams and managing the change required to stick the landing. I live in San Francisco and believe the world has room for maps that could be real, but often aren't.
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
Søren Kierkegaard
I have lived a career so far that makes perfect sense, when told in reverse.
I was trained as a lawyer and spent five years as a white-collar litigator. I liked learning about the stories of my clients. I didn't like reading 1,000,000 of their emails.
I enrolled in graphic design school as an evening student, which led to founding and running a small nonprofit in Kenya. This combination of international development and design and lingering lawyer-ness led to a position on the founding team of IDEO.org, a fledgling IDEO startup bringing the tenets of human-centered design to poverty alleviation challenges around the world.
I drank from the firehose of international complexity and learned a great deal about helping risk-averse organizations like the UK Government innovate and change.
These experiences got me thinking about all of the lawyers I knew working in law firms and government agencies and just how scared of change most of them were, so I teamed up with IDEO's general counsel to found IDEO's first-ever Legal Design + Innovation practice.
After five years of building that practice, I grew curious if I could build something similar outside the walls of IDEO, which led me to found Pneumatic, a legal innovation studio working with law firm and government clients on gnarly innovation challenges.
This most recent chapter with Pneumatic has coincided with the rise of AI tools and the ability to build things for myself and with my clients on a scale I never would have imagined.
I'm enormously excited for what comes next, and I'd love to take that journey with you.
I believe that innovation within organizations must be top down and bottom up at the same time. The perspectives of CEOs and paralegals are equally relevant.
I excel at building the trust of senior leaders. I also excel at building prototypes and production code and data systems. I'm a full-stack innovator.
I strongly believe that proud professionals like lawyers are most influenced by their peers. Change happens through peer networks and peer-to-peer learning — and yes, peer-to-peer competition — not top-down mandates.
I am unusually comfortable in risk-averse institutional cultures. I have deep empathy for people, but also for the bureaucracies in which they work. I know how to make change happen most anywhere.
I am walking, talking analogous inspiration. I bring innovation learnings and experience from the public sector, private law firms, philanthropic clients, federal governments, Fortune 500 companies, and startups.