Moving organizations from counting to deciding.

I initially planned on working in environmental policy, with my first job at a Water Management District in Florida. Entry-level jobs there happened to be managing water quality data. Being out on the water scooping up samples was fun, but being at my desk building a Microsoft Access database was even more fun. I decided to go back for a more quantitatively oriented master's degree, and stepped from there into the world of tech.

I met someone at a party who ran a game company and thought it sounded like the most fun group of nerds I could work with. I was right, and I was so lucky to be able to learn data analytics with a groundbreaking group of fantastic people at Zynga, my first games job. I launched a half-dozen games, absorbed an amazing amount of analytics, and learned that disciplined focus is what protects a team's energy and ensures analytics efforts directly move the core mission forward.

I joined Facet to work somewhere with a mission, democratizing financial planning for people outside the traditional income brackets. I was the first data hire, taking us from Excel and chewing gum to a production staff and fantastic team. The highest-value work wasn't just technical, it was building an organizational culture where data guides strategy rather than rubber-stamping pre-existing assumptions.

I left EA earlier this year to think carefully about what comes next, and to make a deliberate move into a mission-oriented space. I've started to build some tools to continue to test ideas and explore questions in domains I'm less familiar with.