About

My grandfather built a windmill in his backyard. It's one of my earliest memories, watching this thing he made with his own hands actually turn and work. Every summer I'd visit him in Poland and we'd always have some project going. He'd weld me a custom scooter, or we'd tear apart an old engine just to see how it worked. I remember him saying in the '90s that someday people would zip around on little motorized scooters. At the time it sounded crazy, but he had this way of seeing what was coming.

That curiosity he sparked in me never left. Growing up, I started to believe I could figure out how to build anything I set my mind to. This led me to study design and photography in Germany, where I discovered analog film. There's something about the hands-on process of developing your own photos that connected back to those summers with my grandfather. I'm still shooting and developing film today, more than a decade later.

In 2013, a friend described his new job to me. "Product management." He talked about collaborating with different people, connecting ideas across teams, and inventing solutions to problems. It clicked immediately. This sounded like everything I loved about making things, but applied to building products and experiences. I convinced him to help me get a foot in the door, and I've been doing it ever since.

My grandfather is 89 now, and he's still at it. He's retrofitted that same windmill with solar panels, and every day he manually adjusts them to follow the sun across the sky. An analog solar tracker, built with the same hands that taught me anything was possible.