Brooklyn
Made.

I was born in Caracas, Venezuela, and came to the United States when I was three, a citizen by thirteen. My family worked hard to build something here: cleaning houses, working restaurants, making an honest living.

In college I worked in a warehouse. Hard, unglamorous manual labor. Early mornings, heavy loads, the kind of work you feel in your body at the end of the day. What stayed with me wasn't the work. It was who showed up to do it.

I learned early that the right two or three people, working without backup, can move mountains. Making something happen with no resources is not that different from making something happen with a great team and real stakes. You find the people who know how. You get to work. You figure it out.

I started as a graphic designer in print, editorial, and early web at The New Yorker, Wired, and Men's Vogue, where I learned what it means to have standards. Then I moved into products: MakerBot, Reserve, ClassPass, Google. There I learned the hardest design problems aren't visual; they're systems, organizational, and decision problems. That realization is what eventually pulled me toward building organizations and better products.

I have always loved making things. Letterpress prints. Furniture. 3D printed figures that end up in someone's hands. A deck can hide a weak idea behind a good story. A physical object can't. It's proof you actually did the work.

At Disney I built something. VP of Product Design across Disney+ and Hulu, leading design for the experiences subscribers encounter every day: discovery, personalization, browsing, and playback. A design organization of 40+, across both platforms, for hundreds of millions of subscribers worldwide.

Before Disney, I taught full-time at General Assembly. Ten-week immersive UX programs, five days a week. It forced me off the product and onto the person. I learned that teaching is not about talking. It is about creating the conditions where someone else can grow. That shifted how I think about management. The job is not to build empires. It is to build people. Some of my best hires came from that classroom.

The work I find most interesting is not the interfaces we ship. It is the conditions that allow us to ship better interfaces, repeatedly, over time. Hiring the right people. Building the right culture. Making sure everyone has the information they need to make good decisions.

I care about people. Not as a talking point. As a practice. Sometimes that looks like a barbecue. Sometimes it looks like a conversation nobody wants to have. The point is never the gesture. The point is that people know they are valued.

I live in LA with my wife Mindy, my kids Ryder and Keirin, and our dog Moon. New York still has my heart. I am not going soft. I am just working on not calling 58 degrees a cold front.