Do Something Crazy: From First PM to Founder

After 4 years at Observe, I’m excited to announce that I’m starting a company with my longtime friend and abettor Nick DiRienzo! Today marks a unique occasion where an unexpected encounter from nearly ten years ago profoundly altered the course of my life. In 2012 I met Nick DiRienzo at a Startup Weekend hackathon in Rochester NY. Working late into the night fueled by knockoff energy drinks and pizza we became friends and by the next morning left without exchanging numbers. As fate would have it we would run into each other again, this time in a different state at a Google intern event in Mountain View, CA. This time we got each other’s contact info. Nick has been one of my best friends ever since and we’ve bonded over our shared love of technology and careers in technology. There’s no other person in the world that I could see myself starting a company with other than Nick.

If you can find a grey-haired VC that worked through the 90s a lot of them will tell you that the new AI wave is the closest thing they’ve seen to a “new internet” opportunity-wise in a long time. Much like the early internet AI is being simultaneously overhyped and neglected in the same way. I believe that we will only get the productivity benefits of AI if we rethink workflows from the ground up. It’s simply not enough to bolt on an AI feature and try to augment an existing workflow or product segment.

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