I make playful, useful web things.

You can call me 15. I studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and graduated with degrees in physics, mathematics and computer science; my thesis was on quantum information in combinatorial game theory. Throughout my college career, I spent much of my free time developing the most cutting-edge speech synthesis algorithm known to humanity at the time.

During my final year at MIT, I co-founded an analytics startup that would later be accepted into the Y Combinator accelerator. While I had originally planned to pursue a PhD with my research, I ultimately made the decision to move to San Francisco to continue working on the startup as its Chief Technology Officer. Eventually, I left the startup, as its pivot to a B2B model made me disillusioned and less excited about the work I was doing. After that, I was hired by a few other YC companies as CTO, but was never fully satisfied with my place in life.

In 2020, I created 15.ai, a project that started as a silly little showcase of my speech synthesis research applied to funny characters, which ended up exploding in popularity and becoming a precursor to generative AI apps like ChatGPT. I never monetized 15.ai or profited from it. I wanted it to feel like the older internet I loved, a place where people made strange, joyful things for their own sake, not because every bit of attention needed to become a business model.

Despite not being an artist or graphic designer myself, I've always been obsessed with web design. Seeing and interacting with websites that exude careful attention to detail and clear intent made me want to build things on the web with that same craftsmanship. My most recent project, Artist Alley, took me over a year to design; I went through several different designs that were ultimately scrapped before I landed on one that, in my opinion, epitomizes the coziness and authenticity of an artist alley.

I travel very frequently and love going to conventions; in the last two years, I attended over 30 cons, the majority of which were brony and furry conventions (though I also enjoy attending anime and comic cons). I am a huge fan of video games, especially competitive ones. My favorite game of all time is Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, in which I reached the highest rank of FACEIT Level 10. I also love playing chess (I usually hover around 2200 ELO on Chess.com), Team Fortress 2, and rhythm games, especially Dance Dance Revolution (DDR). I stream on Twitch from time to time for fun!