Location San Francisco, California, United States Regions San Francisco Bay Area, West Coast, Western US Gender Male
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Growing up in Las Vegas is what began my fascination with optimized user experiences. You really only need to look around to see them everywhere. From casinos and buffets to swimming pools and walkways – everything can be optimized. No clocks, no windows, all genius. The lessons I learned at an early age stuck with me over the years, driving me, of
course, to learn how to build optimizations of my own.
I thought going to design school would be a good start, and attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where the Suprematists, particularly Malevich, struck a chord. Paintings such as White on White (no need to look it up, it's exactly what you think it is), were optimized like none other. In fact, by the time I graduated, I decided the most optimal way to do a painting is never to start it.
After graduating, I began taking my web development hobby more seriously, moving to San Francisco, where I worked with a small development team. I was finally building my own optimized user experiences, and, apparently wasn’t half bad at it. That small team of 3 rapidly grew to 20, landing clients like Apple, VMWare, Intuit, Pfizer, and dozens of start-ups that went on to do big things.
Not ones to stay idle, in our spare time, August and I were experimenting with building what we hoped to be the next generation of game monetization. We were on a quest to find the connection between casino-style games and contemporary mobile games. That’s how we landed on our current trajectory and what led us both to stop what we were doing and build Arbiter.
