Founder, engineer,
& world music nerd.

Most of my time goes into Sonora, an online modern music conservatory that condenses a four-year undergraduate music education into six to twelve months. We've graduated over six thousand guitar players, and six of them have won Grammys.

I also run Playback, a podcast featuring long-form interviews with some of the world's best musicians. Guests have included Billy Strings, Tommy Emmanuel, Victor Wooten, among many others. The show has reached over 17 million people in its first year.

I'm deeply interested in how AI is going to shape the future of work. I used it to completely reshape my company, which was written about in Time magazine, and I run Pioneer Species, an intensive program that helps non-technical professionals get fluent in agents, harnesses, and orchestration.

Before all of this, I built and sold PodClear, a podcast software company, and was a product engineering leader on the growth team at Patreon.

I trained as a jazz guitarist, which opened the door to everything else. I've spent years studying folk traditions on the ground in Brazil, Argentina, Ireland, Spain, Nepal, Appalachia, and the Amazon, learning directly from the people who carry those traditions.

A thread through everything I do is bringing people together. I host invite-only intensive recreational learning retreats on subjects ranging from the bureaucratic dark arts to jhana engineering, and I run annual planning retreats for close friends in Mexico City.

I split time between Nashville and San Francisco. Outside of work, I'm usually mountain biking, climbing, or skiing.