I’m an English-born, Canadian-raised software entrepreneur and engineer. I went to the University of Waterloo to study Computer Science before dropping out to start a startup. For most of my twenties, I’ve been working on technology for ethereum.
This started with scaling payments on Ethereum using a technology called state channels. Over time it became clear that people weren’t yet ready for the kinds of use cases that state channels enabled (i.e., micropayments, agentic payments, streaming and instant payments). However, we built some really cool tech, like Web3Torrent.
So, I pivoted my focus towards building Optimism. Our mission was to scale Ethereum without compromising on security or decentralization. We were one of the defining projects that shaped the “Layer 2” ecosystem according to Vitalik Buterin’s vision of a “rollup-centric Ethereum”. Alongside Coinbase, we launched Base on the OP Stack.
By 2023, it was clear that stablecoins were the most important outcome of the blockchain industry. Unfortunately, despite all of our work to scale Ethereum, most of the real world usage of these products were using Tether on Tron. I wrote and spoke about this often while working on multiple projects related to stablecoins like World Chain, Stable, and Build Canada: Crypto.
Much of the work I did on stablecoins led to me towards Tempo, which is a return to my original focus on payments-first infrastructure for blockchains. We’re building a payments-focused L1 blockchain that uses all of the best ideas from years of scaling research and bringing it to the modern internet payments stack. We’re hiring!
For more, see my projects and other writing. I also really enjoy travelling and photography.
I’ve invested in dozens of startups including Othership, QA Wolf, Daimo, Erebor, Stable, Farcaster, Ambrook, Mercantile, Software Applications Incorporated, Conduit, Splits, Axiom, OpenSea, Agora, Flex, and many more.