Today, April 26, 2024, I’m joining Gather.
When I first wrote to the team, I kept coming back to how naturally Gather connects parts of my life that do not usually meet in one job.
Almost my entire professional career has involved WebRTC and real-time communication. Most recently, I worked on that kind of infrastructure at Hopin, in what is now RingCentral Events. I have spent years thinking about how people connect through video, how those systems behave at scale, and how to make the technology disappear behind the experience. Gather gives me the chance to keep working on those hard real-time problems in service of a product with a very different sense of place.
That sense of place mattered to me immediately. The Cozy Office, Industrial Office, and Dungeon Escape templates reminded me of the early Pokémon games I loved growing up. Moving through a small pixel world, discovering rooms, and seeing other people nearby makes online interaction feel less like opening a tool and more like arriving somewhere.
I have always had a soft spot for games, too. In college, I built small clones of Bomberman, Cargo-Bot, and Guitar Hero. They were not serious products, but they taught me how much joy there is in creating a world with rules and then watching someone else understand it through play. Joining Gather feels like a chance to reconnect that creative instinct with the engineering experience I have built since then.
The role also fits the way I like to work. Colleagues have described me as a pragmatic engineer: someone who wants to discuss architecture carefully, understand the tradeoffs, and then recognize when the team has enough clarity to build. Good engineering requires thought, but the goal is not to analyze forever. The goal is to create value for the people using the product.
The description I return to most often is simpler: I am a problem solver. Whether a problem lives in the backend, the frontend, the architecture, or the way a team works together matters less to me than understanding it and finding a useful path forward. Gather has the kind of product where all of those problems can meet.
I’m excited to bring my experience with real-time systems to a team building something playful, human, and ambitious. More than anything, I’m looking forward to learning the world of Gather from the inside and helping shape what comes next.