Venice Beach. "NERD" hat mandatory.
PhD physicist. Hardware director. Dad.
I spent my 20s at Caltech making nanomechanical oscillators cold enough to touch the quantum ground state — stuff published in Nature and Physical Review Letters. Then Apple called, and I spent four years making Face ID work at iPhone scale: VCSELs, structured light, dot projectors shipping in hundreds of millions of pockets.
After that I went underground — literally — at The Boring Company, integrating a 300-ton tunneling machine that had to beat a snail named Gary doing 13mm/s. (We're working on it.)
Now I'm Director of Hardware at Trace, building AI-powered soccer cameras that automatically film and edit your kid's game. 10,000+ units on pitches worldwide. Hardware-as-a-service, real problems, real soccer moms with opinions.
When I'm not shipping hardware I'm vibe-coding games, running AI experiments on HuggingFace, and trying to raise two girls (7 and 4) with less helicopter and more "figure it out yourself." That last part became @rocksolidparenting.
For SCIENCE,
— Alex
