Biography
about me
Some of my earliest lessons in systems came from games at the kitchen table. Magic: The Gathering with my older brother taught me to read; poker with my mother taught me probability. Before I had the vocabulary for any of it, I was practicing the same basic move: understand the rules, read the odds, and choose from the hand in front of me.
Basketball made that habit less abstract. I played through middle and high school, and I loved the game, but the conversation around it often felt detached from the court. Coaches, players, and the media could explain a possession through effort, momentum, or toughness while ignoring the things that actually moved the score. A lot has changed over the last 15 years, but back then it felt like people could talk about basketball without measuring what mattered.
Then, in a pregame talk, my high school coach introduced Dean Oliver’s Four Factors, and the sport snapped into focus for me: beneath the motion and noise, four measurable things usually explained why a team was winning.
After that, drills had reasons attached. Better hand positioning and cleaner passes meant fewer turnovers. Footwork and jump-stops connected to effective field goal percentage and free throw percentage. Boxing out became a matter of reading the miss early enough to reach the ball first.
I still carry that habit into how I work, because the world is full of information and inherited stories can make people miss what the information is saying. I studied Economics to understand human systems, then Computer Science to build new ones. I’m still drawn to the same work: finding structure inside the noise, figuring out what actually matters, and building from there.