It started with competition robotics
In elementary school I joined a VEX robotics team. We won a world championship - then another. What stuck wasn't the trophies; it was the loop of designing a machine, watching it fail, and making it better by Saturday.
I ran that loop every season for ten years - VEX IQ, then VEX V5, then FRC 7419 as drive team leader, then the VEX AI machines. A new robot designed, machined, wired, tuned and driven each year, and a mechanism library that grew with it: transmissions, differentials, pneumatic ratchets, launchers, lifts and intakes.
That loop became a career. I co-founded Robolabs to teach it to thousands of kids, then went deep on real hardware - LiDAR at AEye, mobile robots at Omron, lab automation at 10X Genomics. Each role taught me a different slice of taking a machine from idea to the field.
Most recently I built Universal Intelligence, a robotics data company - teaching robots to do the work people actually don't want to, starting with the data. Same loop, higher stakes. What I want next is that problem at production scale: machines that leave the lab and hold up in the field.
