Early Challenges and a New Beginning
I grew up as a bundle of restless energy. In elementary school, I was that kid with ADHD who couldn't quite sit still or fit in. In crowded public school classrooms, I often felt lost in the shuffle, my potential obscured by distraction. My loving parents, seeing I needed a different environment, gave me the chance to switch to a smaller private school for middle school. But the transition was anything but easy – I was the new kid, awkward and anxious, even bullied at times. I craved a supportive circle of friends, a community where I belonged. Little did I know, a change in scenery and a nearby swimming pool would soon transform my life.
A Summer that Changed Everything
When my family moved neighborhoods to be closer to school and my dad's work, we happened to settle just a few doors down from the community pool. That summer, desperate for connection after a tough sixth grade, I found sanctuary in the water. I spent every day from dawn to dusk at that pool – literally 7 AM swim team practice to 9 PM open swim. Chlorine became my daily perfume. In that pool, I found more than a way to channel my hyperactive energy; I found friends who splashed and laughed alongside me and mentors who encouraged me. For the first time in a long time, I felt like I belonged. Day by day, lap by lap, I grew stronger and more confident. By the end of the summer, I was in the best shape of my life and brimming with new self-belief. When winter came, it showed – I had a breakout swimming season, even qualifying for the Northeastern Zone Championships, a regional meet that opened my eyes to a future in the sport. That one golden summer gave me everything: a supportive community, emotional resilience, and the work ethic that would carry me through countless challenges ahead.
Rising to New Heights
Armed with a renewed sense of self, I dove into competitive swimming with full force through middle and high school. It became my outlet and my passion. Of course, the journey had setbacks – in my senior year of high school I tore my MPFL (a critical ligament in the knee) and was sidelined from the pool for half the season. Watching my teammates train while I rehabbed was agonizing, but it taught me one of my greatest lessons: how to be patient, positive, and adaptive in the face of adversity. I focused on what I could do – visualizing races, strengthening my core, and maintaining a winner's mindset. When I was finally cleared to dive back in, I was determined to make every stroke count. In a storybook ending to my high school career, I won four gold medals at the state championship meet, and we brought home the Pennsylvania state title to our school for the first time in over a decade. In total, I graduated as a four-time PIAA state gold medalist. That success led to another dream come true: I was recruited to Princeton University as part of their swim team, where I would go on to become a three-time Ivy League champion. Standing on those podiums, I remembered the shy, bullied kid I once was. It was hard to believe how far I'd come. But swimming wasn't just about medals and records for me – it was about pushing limits and learning discipline. After racing a grueling 200-yard individual medley at States, my muscles were on fire and my vision blurred from exertion. Yet, I touched the wall knowing I had given it my all. As world-record-holding freestyler Ian Thorpe once said, "For myself, losing is not coming in second. It's getting out of the water knowing you could have done better. For myself, I have won every race I've been in." I embraced that mindset fully. To me, victory was about personal excellence and effort, a philosophy that would fuel not only my athletic pursuits but eventually my professional ones as well.
From the Pool to Programming
At Princeton, between morning swim practice and afternoon weight sessions, another world captivated me: the world of computer science and machine learning. I found myself as intrigued by algorithms as I was by race strategies. I majored in Computer Science, diving into coursework on artificial intelligence with the same enthusiasm I had for training sets in the pool. Under the guidance of inspiring professors, I delved into supervised learning and data-driven forecasting. I even had an unlikely early taste of AI research during a high school summer trip: A friend and I tried to map seagrass beds in the Aegean Sea using a jury-rigged windsurf board weighted with ropes and a lot of youthful optimism. Let's just say the Greek coast guard wasn't amused by our DIY oceanography. That little adventure – equal parts audacious and naive – sparked my fascination with AI's potential. I realized that with the right model, we could compress what might be years of manual data gathering into a few hours of computation. It turns out stubborn determination can achieve a lot more when paired with powerful tools. I began to see coding and training models as a kind of mental cross-training for the problem-solving muscles I'd built through sports. Swimming had taught me about focus, incremental improvement, and grit – and those same qualities drove me to excel in machine learning research. Late nights debugging code felt a lot like those early mornings swimming laps: methodical, challenging, but deeply rewarding. In both cases, progress came from consistent effort and the support of a great team. By the time I earned my degree in 2015, I was hooked on the idea that AI could change the world – and I was determined to be part of that transformation.
Building Expertise and Seeing the Gaps
The next decade took me on an incredible journey through the tech industry. I traded my goggles for a laptop (though I kept swimming for sanity) and joined Amazon to work on the Alexa AI team. There, I learned first-hand how hard it is to put cutting-edge AI into millions of homes. I had fantastic mentors and managers who taught me how to scale systems and think about products from the user's perspective. One lesson in particular stuck with me: the importance of feedback and observability in AI. In one instance, I submitted a piece of feedback to Alexa's voice assistant and then tracked how long it took to influence the product. The glacial pace of that feedback loop opened my eyes. If even a tech giant struggled to quickly learn from user interactions, how could AI-driven products truly improve? I started envisioning better ways to monitor AI systems in real time and glean insights from them. After Amazon, I sharpened my skills further at Bloomberg and then Datadog, working on high-throughput data processing and cloud infrastructure. At Datadog, I finally got the chance to build that vision of better AI observability into reality: I led the development of a new machine-learning observability platform, scaling it from an experimental idea into a flagship product used by companies around the world. Taking a project from a handful of exploratory users to a robust service for many organizations was surreal and taught me the power of perseverance and collaborative innovation. I also realized how much I loved building something that helped people make sense of complex systems. It was a direct continuation of the same drive I had as a swimmer – always asking, "How can we do better next time?". Throughout these years, I never lost touch with my athletic side. I still swam laps or hit the gym regularly, and I began to notice a pattern in myself and my colleagues: we all struggled to balance work, life, and health. Even in a tech company full of brilliant minds, many of us were using fairly primitive tools to track our fitness and wellness. I'd see teammates try one-size-fits-all workout apps or fad diets that didn't stick, largely because these tools didn't account for our individual circumstances – a heavy on-call week, a newborn at home, or the stress of a product launch. This observation planted the seed of an idea in me. I had spent ten years learning to build AI systems and systems systems; perhaps it was time to combine that knowledge with my passion for health and performance.
Founding Wake AI: Wellness for a Dynamic World
In 2024, I decided to take the leap and build something of my own. The problem I set out to solve was one I felt personally and saw all around me: most wellness products today are rigid. They assume everyone starts from the same baseline and stays the same over time, which couldn't be further from the truth. Life is dynamic, and our health journeys are too. Yet the apps and programs meant to help us often fail to adjust when we go through changes. Busy season at work? Recovering from an injury? Training for a marathon or juggling kids' schedules? Traditional wellness tools don't really get it. This one-size-fits-all approach in a $6.3 trillion wellness industry is a huge missed opportunity. Here's where I saw room for improvement:
- One Size Doesn't Fit All: Generic fitness and nutrition advice ignores what makes you you. What works for someone else might not work for you, and vice versa.
- Fragmented View of Health: The mind, body, and lifestyle are deeply interconnected, yet typical products silo things like exercise, nutrition, and recovery into separate boxes. This fragmented understanding means you never see the whole picture.
- No Why, Only What: Many tools can tell you what you did (steps taken, calories burned, hours slept) but not why you feel a certain way or hit a plateau. There's a lack of causal insight – they show what happened, not why.
- Not Truly Actionable: From fancy graphs to fitness jargon, a lot of wellness data isn't actionable for everyday people. It can actually alienate folks who aren't already fitness gurus. Advice needs to be in plain English and tailored to real life.
I felt these pain points myself, and I knew technology – especially AI – could help fix them. My vision was to create a wellness product as dynamic as life itself, something that would serve "anyone who sweats," whether you're an elite athlete, a busy parent squeezing in workouts, or a retiree staying active in new ways. So I founded Wake AI with a simple belief: we can leverage artificial intelligence to provide personalized, adaptive health guidance that fits into your life. In short, I'm building what I like to call the "wellness intelligence layer" – an AI-powered coach that doesn't just track what you did, but can predict what will happen if you make a change, and guide you accordingly. If you increase your protein intake or add an extra rest day, how will it impact your energy and performance? Wake AI will crunch the data and give you insights, turning health from guesswork into science.
I started with what I know best: swimming. Our first product, affectionately codenamed BodySauce, uses computer vision and advanced AI (the same kind of tech behind self-driving cars and facial recognition) to analyze swim technique from video. We chose swimming not only because it's been my lifelong sport, but also because it's the perfect testing ground for holistic wellness analytics. Swimming is a full-body exercise that demands cardio endurance, strength, technique, and even mindfulness. By understanding a swimmer's form and performance, we can infer a lot about their overall health. For example, if someone's stroke is falling apart halfway through a swim, it might indicate they haven't recovered fully – maybe they skimped on sleep. If their kick loses power, perhaps their nutrition (like pre-workout fueling) wasn't sufficient that day. In fact, swimming form can reflect total body wellness: your core strength, flexibility, and heart-lung fitness all manifest in your stroke mechanics. These insights, starting in the pool, will inform our broader wellness models.
The long-term objective is to build multimodal world models that understand how every facet of your health interacts – how your running performance might affect your sleep needs, or how stress at work might impact your blood pressure during a workout. By connecting the dots, Wake AI aims to give each user a personalized wellness strategy that adapts as their life evolves. Our mission is not just to get people fitter or faster – it's to help build healthier communities where individuals can truly show up for each other. I've experienced how a supportive community can elevate someone to heights they never thought possible. From the lifeguards and teammates who cheered on that lonely 12-year-old kid at the community pool, to the mentors and colleagues who believed in me as an engineer, I owe everything to communities that nurtured me. Wake AI aspires to pay that forward. It's about using AI to give everyone access to the kind of personalized coaching and encouragement that used to be reserved for elite athletes. Whether you're trying to run your first 5K, manage your blood sugar, or simply have more energy to play with your kids, I want Wake AI to be the reliable partner that adjusts to you. If AI is making so many things in life easier and more abundant, why not our health? In a world where machines can handle so much of our work, our strength and vitality as humans become our most precious assets. I truly believe that as AI frees us from certain burdens, we'll have more room to focus on our physical and mental well-being – on quality of life. In the future, success might be measured not just by career milestones, but by things like having vibrant health, the joy of physical achievement, and the wisdom to understand our own bodies. Wake AI is my way of helping usher in that future.
The Road Ahead
Now, I'm channeling all those lessons from the pool, the classroom, and the data center into this new venture. It feels like coming full circle. I began as a kid searching for a way to belong and improve myself, and I've arrived as a founder eager to help others improve themselves and find their own communities of support. The stakes are high – chronic disease and poor health rob so many people of time, energy, and happiness. But I'm optimistic. I've seen how a combination of grit, knowledge, and support can turn underdogs into champions. With Wake AI, I'm striving to build the wellness business of the future – one that uses technology not to replace human coaching or community, but to enhance it. It's surreal and wonderful to take everything I've learned and pour it into a product that could make a difference in people's lives. I often think back to that exhausted feeling after my races, when my muscles ached and my heart was pounding – those moments when I had nothing left to give. In those instances, what kept me going was never the shiny medal or the record time; it was the knowledge that I had pushed myself to my limit and discovered something new about myself in the process. That's the experience I want to bring to everyone, in whatever form it takes for them. Whether you're swimming laps, lifting weights, or just walking around your neighborhood, you deserve a health partner that learns and grows with you. Anyone who sweats and strives to be better should have access to the kind of insight that can fuel their journey. My story is still being written, but one thing is constant: the drive to reach higher and help others do the same. From a summer spent finding friendship in the water to a career spent mastering algorithms, every step has led me here. And as I build Wake AI, I carry with me the same mantra I learned as a young swimmer – the real victory isn't about coming in first; it's about knowing you've given your best. If I can help even one person achieve that feeling in their own wellness journey, then this founder's journey will be worth it. Here's to building a healthier, smarter, and more connected world, one personalized step at a time.