A little about me.

I was born and raised in New York City, the kid of immigrant-entrepreneur parents. My family stayed in Queens, and my dad was a serial entrepreneur — he ran everything from local construction and plumbing to international trading, and I spent my childhood watching my parents build and manage one business after another. That was the air I grew up breathing.

I was never the kid who fit neatly into the social norm. While other kids were out making friends, I was at home on the only desktop computer in the house, taking it apart, configuring it, and optimizing every last setting. My dad noticed how much time I spent glued to that machine, decided I had a knack for it, and bought me my own laptop when I was 8. That gift is where everything really started.

In my early teens my grades fell apart, so my parents sent me to a boarding school in China for two years. I didn't love it — and I definitely spent more time skipping class than sitting in it. What I did do was figure out how to sneak off campus and run a little convenience-store concierge hustle for the other students, fulfilling whatever they needed for a tip. It was my first real taste of building something people would actually pay for. Two years there also left me fluent in Mandarin.

I came back to New York to finish 8th grade and got into a theater-arts high school, where I quietly became the school's unofficial tech support — the administration eventually caught on and started paying me for it, and plenty of people outside school did too. I built my first website at 14, started with forums on open-source software, ran my own proxy systems, and bet early on WordPress. I was honestly scared of programming at first; after a year or so of copying and pasting code from other sites, I got so obsessed with building quality websites that I had no choice but to actually learn to write it.

Building WordPress themes and plugins pulled me into other ventures. At 16 I launched a software-news site that eventually shut down because I couldn't keep up with the writing — but I learned far more from it failing than I would have if it had worked. I scrapped website after website (not proud of the results, or the data I lost along the way) and kept rebuilding. From 2016 to 2018 I ran my first e-commerce store, selling Swarovski crystals to customers in China and Hermès accessories worldwide.

In 2018 I decided it was time to build something I was genuinely passionate about. I taught myself React Native, and after three months of late nights, early mornings, and guidance from people far more experienced than me, I shipped Foodflare in June 2018 — my first consumer app, a food-finder built on the Yelp and Google Places APIs, live on both the Apple App Store and Google Play. It has since been retired, but it's the project that taught me how to actually launch something real. That same year, off the back of everything I'd been building since I was 14, I founded CBN Ventures.

These days I build products at CBN Ventures and keep doing exactly what I've always done — solving real problems with software, chasing ideas worth building, and occasionally over-engineering my own home network just because I can. The goal hasn't changed: build software that makes people's lives easier, alongside people I'm proud to work with.