About me

I’m exploring startup ideas in crypto. I was most recently at Uniswap, after they acquired Genie, an NFT marketplace aggregator that did $800M of trading volume where I was head of product.

I want to build a mainstream business that uses crypto behind the scenes. I’m excited to bring together my DeFi and NFT expertise with my consumer software experience working at Lyft and Microsoft.

I enjoy coding, though my strengths are in user research, design, and go-to-market. I iterate quickly by evaluating markets, brainstorming ideas, and validating problems before writing code.

I’m looking for a cofounder who is also technical and is excited to go from 0 to 1.

My Background

Impressive accomplishments

• Improved Lyft’s pay and matching algorithms, reducing costs by $67M/year while increasing top drivers’ earnings by 4%
• Built a system at Kite for scaling our AI code completion plugin, growing language support from 1 to 13+.
• Grew usage 10x of PowerPoint’s AI design features by shipping 30+ changes and running 100+ A/B tests
• Won UNC’s first hackathon as a team, and 2nd place in “most web3” at Uniswap’s company hackathon as a solo hacker
• World-class Go (strategy board game) player, representing Canada in international tournaments

Education

• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (on full-ride merit scholarship), BA in Computer Science, 2016

Employment

• Uniswap, Product Manager, 2022 - 2023
• Genie (acquired by Uniswap), Head of Product, 2022
• Lyft, Senior Product Manager, 2020 - 2022
• Kite (acquired by Affirm), First Product Hire, 2019 - 2020
• Microsoft, Product Manager, 2016 - 2019

Life story

I have always worked on my own projects. I resold candy when I was 8, sold candy kebabs in middle school, ran a tutoring service in high school, and built apps in college.

I am disciplined and focused. I stopped watching TV or played video games in 2007, when I wanted to focus on academics in middle school, and haven’t gone back.

I love scrappy growth. I won election to student council by a landslide with a rick-roll-inspired candidate poster, got enough Lyft and Uber credit to take it for free for years by posting in freshman orientation Facebook groups, and sold hundreds of t-shirts in one weekend by writing in chalk around my campus.

Then, I got a front-row seat at 4 startups as we grew from pre-fundraising/PMF to Series B.

Now, I just can’t stop thinking about ideas. When I was taking the night shift for my newborn daughter, who woke up every 45min from 9pm to 5am, I chose to build prototypes rather than sleep.

More notes

Links:

• Why I left my job to build a startup
• Views on work and life
• LinkedIn / Twitter

Links:

• Deep dives in crypto
• Past investigations

About you

I’m looking for a true thought partner who:

• Is methodical about prioritization: You ruthlessly prioritize, are deliberate about the why behind what you’re working on, and structure every feature as an experiment. You believe in the power of saying “no” to as many things as possible so we can excel at a few things.
• Is also technical. However, you understand that a lot of your time is not spent coding, and that coding is not your highest point of leverage. It’s more important to prioritize what to build, research the competition and how it’s been built before, think through if we should build vs. buy, and reuse what you can, before you start building.
• Lives in the SF Bay Area. I prefer in-person collaboration with the flexibility of WFH. You think of working together similar to a marriage, and understand how important it is to be deeply in sync with someone you’ll spend half of your waking hours working alongside.
• Respects the power of distribution: It’s not enough to build a great but generic user experience. More important is knowing our audience, thinking about how we reach them, and building our product specifically for distribution.
• Focuses on the problem: You are agnostic to solutions. You don’t build on a new technology simply because it’s interesting. If a problem can be simply solved without new tech, you find that ideal.
• Iterates as quickly as possible: This is in everything that we do. We don’t plan to think about something, we work on it immediately. We share direct feedback to each other frequently and immediately act on it. We listen to users and make changes quickly.
• Be short-term impatient, long-term patient
• Are passionate about incentives: Our entity name is Coordination Inc. We believe in using blockchain to coordinate people and capital at a scale that has not been possible before. This is the most fascinating thing ever - it’s like a strategy game but on the world level.

Next steps

Would love to hear from you, even if some of the above don’t match. Contact me at:

✉️

firstinitial lastname g at gmail

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