About

I have been doing product management since before I knew what product management was. When I was young, I sold “lucky flowers” on Valentine’s Day to single people — the idea being that they would bring you luck finding a partner the following year. We sold 150 flowers in two hours.

Later, in travel, I noticed a bigger shift: Asian consumers were getting wealthier while the industry was still selling them seven-day, eight-city bus tours with fast food for dinner. I built for that emerging customer instead. The business generated $1 million in its first year.

I tend to notice when customers, technology, or markets have shifted before the product or the organization has caught up. At Coursera, entering a new market launching university certificates to enterprise customers, with classes selling out in days. At Vizient, turning a healthcare data asset into six products and roughly $200 million in ARR.

For the last three years I raised an acquisition fund and evaluated companies as a potential CEO. That expanded my view from product strategy to company strategy. It also taught me to think about product strategy as capital allocation. There are always a hundred things we could build. Leadership is deciding where to place a few consequential bets, and building the organization capable of winning them.

Roughly half of funded searchers never close a deal before their capital runs out, and that share is rising. So I built Closeness.ai, three AI-native products that cut deal search and review time in half for investors and investment firms. I learned the most effective way to launch products in the AI era. Rather than scoping a roadmap, I now ship a working product in days, put it in front of paying customers, and only hand it to engineers once there is real traction. Building got faster. The harder lesson was distribution: the product is the easy half.

Away from work, I travel as often as I can. Travel to me is not just seeing beautiful places. It is how I meet people I would not otherwise meet. They change my perspective and they humble me. To me, a stranger is just a friend I have not met yet.