About

Most of what I build starts as a complaint.

Enterprise planning software costs a fortune, takes two quarters to change, and hands you a model you cannot inspect. Materialized views recompute a million rows because one row moved. A résumé gets ninety seconds of skimming and then a guess. Every one of those was something I lived with for years before I decided to go and write the alternative.

So: planWell, an open-source EPM tool, built by someone who administered the commercial ones long enough to know which features are load-bearing and which are sales demos. duckDBSP and pg_dbsp, two attempts at the same idea — that a materialized view should cost you the delta and not the dataset — one inside DuckDB, one inside Postgres. Work With Me, a desktop AI coworker that runs on whichever model you choose, because the alternative is renting your tools from a single vendor. And a longer tail of things I built because I wanted them to exist: a study tracker that measures retention instead of coverage, an offline PDF editor, a pond full of neural networks that teach themselves to forage.

The nineteen years

I have spent my career at the seam between finance and engineering — the place where a planning model meets a data pipeline and somebody has to make both of them true at once.

At Gusto I own FP&A transformation and the systems roadmap, and support the migration onto a new planning platform. At eBay I owned the FP&A planning platform and the Anaplan Center of Excellence, running enterprise Revenue, OPEX, CAPEX, and Headcount planning and the roadmap behind it. At Sonder I founded the Finance Systems function outright, moved FP&A off Adaptive Insights onto Anaplan, architected the revenue, rent, and income-statement models the company planned with, and built the pipelines underneath them on Snowflake, dbt, and Airflow — work that turned out to matter for IPO readiness. At Adobe I architected global expense planning across more than $10B in annual spend and led a team supporting 150+ FP&A users. Before that, at Intel Security, I automated enough of the forecasting and reporting cycle to cut analyst workload by two thirds.

The pattern is the same every time. Somebody hands you a process that runs on spreadsheets and heroics, and you replace it with a system. The finance part is the domain; the interesting part is always the system.

The rest of it

MBA in Entrepreneurship and Product Management from UC Berkeley Haas. B.Tech in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from NIT Calicut. Master Anaplanner — Anaplan’s highest credential — and a Certified ScrumMaster.

I live in Concord, California. If something here is useful to you, or you think I am wrong about any of it, write to me.