about me

i was born in the chicago suburbs but have been living in san diego since i was two. i spent a lot of my childhood tinkering—writing a blog about my lego creations, building roller coasters out of wood, and starting a pc-building club with friends. i even launched an italian restaurant in my backyard.

in high school, i was deeply involved in pf debate, spending four years traveling, writing cases late into the night, and mastering the art of argumentation. i also ran launchology, a hackathon with over 600 participants from 28 countries and $500k+ in prizes.

during my first weeks of college, i was inspired by luke and aidan's jam sessions to start buildillinois. we've come a long way—hosting events like hackathons, demo days, vc mixers, retreats, and co-working sessions for over 1000 people, securing $120k+ in sponsorships, and collaborating with buildspace, soma capital, entrepreneur first, telora, z fellows, leapyear, stackblitz, and more.

most importantly, in just a year, we've created opportunities for students to raise millions, get funded by accelerators like ycombinator and founders inc, and work at companies like amazon, meta, superpower, coinbase, and goldman sachs.

i've also built a few projects. most recently, i created downloadmytiktoks.com with lunar media, which garnered 500k impressions and thousands of users in just 48 hours. we helped top creators like brooke monk save all their content in the face of the ban, all for free. other projects include x-bookmark-search, a 100% free and local way to semantically search your twitter bookmarks. check it out here.

i spend a lot of my free time traveling, learning how to dj, hanging out with friends, working out/running, making coffee at home, and just having a good time.

if you're working on something interesting, reach out—i'd love to chat. email me or dm me on twitter.