I’m currently sitting on an ✈️ airplane with Jackie headed to Switzerland for a week. It’s been an an astonishing amount of time since our last vacation, and I couldn’t be more excited to travel. There’s been a fair amount of change recently, so I’m excited to share a bit about what’s new and exciting.
Over the last year, I’ve had the honor of being able to lead design over at Apollo Neuroscience. Apollo is a very interesting little product. Effectively it’s a wearable device thats quite unlike any other in the sense that it’s an intervention and not a tracker. Apollo doesn’t ingest your sleep, measure your HRV, or tell you about your fitness. Rather, Apollo is a device that transmits vibrational patterns to your body that actively work to sooth your nervous system in order to help you stress less and sleep better. And it works.
I landed at Apollo last year, coming out of an extended search after being ejected forcibly out of the land of Google amidst the great January layoffs of 2023. I’m very thankful for that landing, and along the way I had a the pleasure and honor of working with some very talented and interesting folks. Principally amongst them was my manager and colleague (and Apollo CTO) Alan Cannistraro. Al is an incredible teammate, a tremendous engineer, and someone I hope to work with again in the future. I’m thankful, too, for getting to work alongside talented creative folks like Aureliano Pisa, my talented report Jonathan Carson, and good people like Matthew Runeare who ran our Brand Creative department.
Ultimately, working at Apollo wasn’t the right fit for me for reasons that I won’t get into here. There were many little signals that led me to the conclusion that leaving was the right move. It’s essential to pick up on these signals – to listen to them, understand them, and converse with them over time. In my case, these signals led me to act and to change course. I’m excited for Apollo’s future, and I wish them nothing but the absolute best moving forward.
It’s so gosh darn cliche to say “I’m thrilled to announce” but in this case it’s just so gosh darn true: I’m unabashedly thrilled to be joining the killer team at Tonal in San Francisco.
At Tonal, I found the rarest of intersections for my particular set of interests: world-class design, incredible hardware, a deep focus on health, a core mission built upon resistance training, and (most importantly) genuine, top-tier folks that care immensely about helping everyday people get stronger.
I get started on June 10th.
As I mentioned at the top, Jackie and I are taking some much-needed vacation before I start up at Tonal next month. We’re currently flying into Zürich, where we’ll stay for 1 night before travelling to Lucerne, then Bern, and then capping our trip with 2 nights in Geneva.
I’ll revisit this page in the next week or 2 with a handful of pics, and perhaps a few additional details of our trip. Ideally, this will contain more than a few shots of cows, cheese, and beer 🐄 🧀 🍺