I grew up in a blacksmith’s forge. 

My otherworldly godfather played a huge part in my upbringing, working as a foraging blacksmith by day and enchanting party host for the bon vivants by night. I remember evenings spent in his forge, heavy with cigar smoke and loud with various languages and laughter. People from all over the world gathered in his high-end mishmash of a kitchen, eager to taste his wild boar ragout and hear stories of the displaced Sicilian and his journey through the culinary world of San Francisco. This is where I learned to explore. 

His studio was a mess of iron scraps and half-finished sculptures, all crowded around a well-worn stove. Chili peppers hung in lazy loops along ledges, and strings of dried persimmons swung from the rafters. Most days, the air smelled of simmering lentils, curing meats, and citrus-spiked olives. The space wasn’t just for making things, it was for gathering. As I got older, I drifted from food to the conversations around it. My French father, a loud and fiercely loving fly fisherman, often joined a chorus of stories: mushroom hunts gone sideways, salmon runs plagued by grizzlies, and the great pig roast of ’09, where a rattlesnake joined the menu following a fierce fight involving kitchen knives and a pitchfork. The food mattered, but the stories mattered more, loud, layered, and full of pride. It was here that I first fell in love with storytelling.

At the same time, I was a Silicon Valley kid, growing up in the pressure cooker of the post-dot-com boom. We were taught that building an app was a prerequisite for college, and learning to code mattered as much as learning Spanish. My days were dominated by the unrelenting pace of the French International Baccalaureate and the constant hum of competition that defined Bay Area ambition. My mother and godmother, both powerhouses in tech marketing yet endlessly kind, taught me to hold onto only what served me: strategic thinking, focus under fire, and an insatiable hunger to learn.

These two worlds were equally formative: the forge and the keyboard, the fire and the feed. 

From one, I inherited a reverence for slow craft, for food grown and gathered, for the importance of salt and imagination in all things. From the other, I gained speed, strategy, and a restless curiosity for what’s next. Both taught me to build, but with entirely different materials. They also taught me to hold two truths at once: that progress comes not only from innovation, but from preservation. That technology can scale ideas, but stories make them human.

Those late nights filled with bread, citrus, and simple stories about life taught me to build things people can feel.

And that’s what I want to keep doing — in every medium I touch.