Hi, I’m John. My core interests flow from these questions:

• What could the future contain? What should it?
• How can we get there? How should we?
• How can I help? How should I?

A lot of topics follow from these. A few of the big ones are:

• Technology
• Startups
• Economics and human behavior
• History

I have a handful of core values which help me navigate these topics:

• Openness - I want to know what’s out there
• Optimism - it’s easier to find reasons to say no than yes
• Playful detachment - I love opinions, but I try to keep them out of my identity
• Preference for the unconventional - An uncommon idea is more useful, even if it is less likely
• Appreciation of inconsistency - I want to minimize friction that would hold me back from changing my mind

I’m a startup founder:

• I co-founded Cognito—an API for identity verification—in 2014.
• We sold Cognito to Plaid in 2022 for ~$250M.
  • I’m particularly proud of how we ran Cognito. We only raised $2M and the company’s headcount was 18 people, including founders, at the time of acquisition.

I’m pretty active online and I like to share my work:

• I program. I’m proud of my contributions to Ruby’s software verification open source ecosystem.
• I tweet ideas I find interesting.
• I occasionally write blog posts.