About me

Over the last decade, I've helped build multiple engineering teams and systems that scaled to millions of users.

As an early engineer at an eCommerce startup called Jet.com, I grew into an engineering leader. That startup sold to Walmart for $3.3 Billion. At Walmart, I grew to a Senior Director of Engineering. My teams and I built Pharmacy Tech, with over $35 Billion in annual revenue and 100m patients.

But I decided to leave that career behind for entrepreneurship.

Coming from poverty, walking away from guaranteed money as an employee wasn't easy for me. I tried a few times to quit and couldn't bring myself to do it. I immigrated to the U.S. from a young age; I was born poor in Albania. Then I grew up poor in The Bronx, NYC, for most of my life too.

But I knew that if I didn't chase my dreams of entrepreneurship, I'd always regret it.

Before quitting, I tried to de-risk the move as much as possible by investing in real estate. And I've fallen in love with real estate on a small scale. I don't want to make real estate a full-time career, but part-time, I've found it's a great way to diversify into atoms from just bits and create some income.

Since quitting, I've realized that building an audience is an asset to entrepreneurship. It's a great way to help people and to have them help you.

As an introverted and sometimes awkward software engineer who's stared at screens way too much, I had no idea where to start. But I just started writing and tweeting my story and everything I've learned so far. In that process, I grew a sizeable audience. Although I still fall back to my hermit ways at times to just build things, I've found that it is very enjoyable to help and teach other people, too.

Since starting this entrepreneurial journey in September 2021, I've built multiple SaaS apps; some of them have flopped, and some have made a little money. I was an equal partner in an online community called Small Bets and helped build that in its early stages. I've created recorded courses and taught people live, which has made some money as well.

I've found that I am very interested in the freedom this entrepreneurial journey has given me. The freedom to be around while my kids are young, the freedom to work at strange hours, the freedom to work on what I want to work on and with who I want to work with.

In between making things, I am taking classes. Even though I have a Bachelor's and Master's in Computer Science, I've become obsessed with becoming more of a multi-disciplinary thinker. I am taking classes in math, science, engineering, etc. But I am not limiting myself to just the hard sciences; I am also enjoying psychology, sociology, history, and so on.

My entrepreneurial heroes, like Charlie Munger, are multi-disciplinary thinkers. Since starting this entrepreneurial journey, I've aspired to become more multi-disciplinary, and I write about that. But if I can think at a fraction of the level my heroes were able to think at, I will consider that a big win.

I have spent most of my career writing code and programming things behind a screen. In the short term, I'd like to experiment with taking the code I write out of just the screen and into some smart devices. Longer term, 5 years plus, my hope is some of the things I build can turn into a more durable business.