In 2015, I joined Rocket Travel, part of the Priceline Group, a travel tech company in Chicago. I'm currently serving as the Director of Engineering, and have led the last three external innovation projects at Rocket. In each team. I still spend quite a bit of my time hands on keyboard, even though I enjoy building teams as much as I enjoy building products.
From 2012 to 2015, I co-founded WeDeliver, a hyperlocal, on-demand delivery startup. I served as founding CTO up until shortly after it was acquired in 2015. This was both fun and challenging; building a lean startup from scratch is always fun, but also working with an awesome distributed team has been amazing. I've built a suite of products from a RESTful API, to a web application based on AngularJS and a distributed order dispatch system.
Although I write a lot of code with my teams, I still enjoy breaking out the whiteboard or glass more often than not. I've scaled my development teams up and down over the years, I've worked by myself, and managed a teams of various sizes, and now even manage and resource multiple teams of developers. At times I worked across timezones and at others I packed everyone into a tiny room to get stuff done. Building a startup involves different stages along the way.
I've also become somewhat of a protagonist for entrepreneurship in the Caribbean. I'm now an organizer for Startup Weekend Trinidad & Tobago, and started collaborating with Startup Weekend organizers around the world to pursue the cause of entrepreneurship.
In 2012, I spent months researching, and building, expanding my technical capabilities, but also finding social avenues where I could use my skill for good - not for evil. For years I've been troubled and challenged to find a way to use technology to reduce incidents and incentives of violent crime. I spent 2 months in customer development looking for ways to use BigData and predictive algorithms to reduce crime. As any lean entrepreneur would do, I quickly pivoted away from that idea when my hypothesis of people wanting to use such a product was invalidated. Someone recently told me that it was ahead of it's time. Probably so.
I've also gotten involved in the Civic hacking space - working on municipal problems, and have joined up with the Code for America Chicago Brigade. I want to build something that helps change the world for the better, and create a business for which my partners and I, and our families will be proud. Along the way I'm learning some amazing lessons.
Want My Help?
After 19 years of professional web application development and software engineering experience, and hacking away at code since 1986. I view programming as an art-form, and art should be free, so every week I set aside one or two hours to mentor developers, students and aspiring entrepreneurs in the city of Chicago or the Caribbean.
Got ideas? Want a technical entrepreneur or a software engineer to collaborate with? Haven't got ideas, and you want to join my brainstorming and business validation? Connect with me on Twitter, LinkedIn or my contact form and we'll see where we can go from there.