My Story
I have a finance degree. I taught myself engineering.
Not through courses or credentials—through building things, breaking things, and figuring it out alongside people who knew more than I did. That's how I went from writing code to leading teams of 250+ engineers at Amazon. That's how I co-founded Amazon Fresh stores, invented Amazon Locker, and built systems that serve millions of people.
Nobody handed me a curriculum. I learned by doing—and by having the right guidance at the right moments.
Now I teach project-based courses at Tufts—entrepreneurship, electronics, robotics, classes where students learn by building real things. I teach this way because I know it works. It's how I learned. It's the most effective path to developing people who can actually solve problems, not just pass tests.
But it's nearly impossible to scale. The bottleneck isn't content—it's presence. When a team hits a wall at 10pm, that's when the real learning happens. And there's only one of me.
That's what I'm building with TeachPilot: AI that extends a coach's presence so more students can learn the way that actually works—by doing, with guidance, in teams.
Why Me?
I've spent 20+ years helping organizations navigate technology transformations—not by handing them tools, but by working alongside them through the hard parts.
At Accenture, I helped Best Buy adopt cloud and AI, guided Warner Bros through an Emmy Award-winning digital transformation, and led 50+ engineers to rebuild NFL.com. At Amazon, I led global teams building AI-driven operations at scale.
The common thread: technology only works when people trust it and can make it their own. That's as true for faculty facing AI disruption as it was for retailers facing e-commerce.
I want to be a partner to educators navigating this shift—someone who's guided organizations through transformations before, and knows the technology is the easy part. The real work is helping people adapt without losing what made them effective.
TeachPilot isn't about replacing coaches with chatbots. It's about making the kind of learning that actually develops people—hands-on, human-guided, team-based—available to more students.
Why “TeachPilot”?
I'm a glider pilot. I fly in high-stakes environments—the European Alps, the Cascades, Appalachian ridges. No engine, long flights, reading the sky and the terrain. Making bad decisions up there can be costly.
Here's something pilots understand that I wish more people in education did: simulators don't replace flight time. Nobody thinks that. Simulators are for building judgment—practicing emergencies, running scenarios, getting reps you couldn't safely get in the air. But you still need actual stick-and-rudder hours to fly.
That's how I think about AI in education. It's a simulator. Great for low-stakes practice, reflection, scenario-based learning. But it doesn't replace being in the room with a team, building something real, getting coached by a human who knows you. Those are the flight hours. You need both.
TeachPilot isn't about replacing instructors. It's about giving them reach—so students get more feedback, more reps, more guidance, and the irreplaceable stuff stays irreplaceable.
If any of this resonates, or if you're wrestling with how AI fits into your teaching, I'd love to hear from you. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or send me a message below.