I build technology that gives people their agency back.
Not as a slogan. As the thing I have spent my life pointed at. This is where it comes from, what I have made of it, and who I am when the headset comes off.
Optionality
I was a sheltered kid until the summer before high school, when I visited my mom's hometown in San Luis Potosí. My cousin, the same age as me, was working the carnicería to help his family. I slept in the adobe house my mom grew up in. I came home with a word I did not have before.
Optionality. The freedom to choose, without being forced to. I had it. Most of the people I loved there did not, and that never stopped mattering to me. QuestBridge is what made the word real for me. A full ride to Stanford, matched in the December of my senior year.
I fell for interactive worlds long before I could afford the good hardware. Pokémon on my brother's hand-me-down Game Boy. Roblox on a Toshiba my dad got gifted from work. In high school I started a club that built and raced FPV drones, because I always needed something I could hold and steer. I never loved computer science. I loved the things it could make real.
Stanford, and finding the room
At Stanford I found the people who were as obsessed with this as I was, and the labs that let me chase it for real.
Every project is the same idea, again
I did not pick these at random. Each one is the same conviction wearing different clothes. Most of them teach the same lesson. Presence is a skill, not a trait. Rehearse the scanner before it is real. Give a kid a way back into their body. Skills can be taught, and environments can teach them.
Easing kids into the scanner before it eases into them.
Awe on a $300 headset, not just a $3000 PC.
Guidance that adapts to the person, not the manual.
Emotional regulation for kids, in mixed reality.
A support animal that reads your body and answers back.
A number on the invisible.
I want to be, for the people who come after me, what I wish I had had.
Where it breaks for people
What pulls me now is where AI and XR meet, and where they break for people. Perception. Attention. Cognitive load. Presence.
I do not believe technology is just a tool. The same affordances that can teach a kid to find their breath can be tuned to harvest attention, and the next generation will grow up inside whichever version gets built. The real question is who architects that shaping, with what intent, accountable to whom. I want to be in that room, and I want to have earned my seat in it.
A lot of how I think about this comes from living it. I design for the version of attention I struggle with myself, and I am headed toward the research that lets me push on it properly. The intervention I care about most is upstream of any single product. It is what gets built at all, and on what assumptions.
Who I am when the headset comes off
Sound
Off the clock I am probably at a show. Bass music is where I feel most present, thousands of people locked to the same drop. Lately I am learning to run the decks myself.
