About Me
I grew up on the early internet, when it still felt like a place of optimism, curiosity, and human possibility, and I’ve watched it drift from that. I still believe we can do great things with technology, and most of what I’ve built grows out of that optimism: open technology that gives people a voice, connects them together, and leaves the world better off.
I started in the late 1990s building Live365, which grew from a nine-listener station running on a PC in my bedroom into the internet’s second-largest radio network. The idea behind it has stayed with me ever since: anyone should be able to broadcast, find an audience, and share what they love. At Yahoo! in 2004 I co-authored Media RSS / mRSS, an open standard which is still the de facto standard for video distribution at scale
(VideoNest, 2026).
Then came eleven years at Google, where I built and led teams growing developer and startup ecosystems in Africa, and later worldwide across Android and beyond. No one had measured what African developers were building, or the economic impact of their work on Africa’s economy, so I worked with my team to make the case to get solving this on Google’s radar. Together we published the first real map of the continent’s developers and its internet economy (a market headed for $180 billion), with Accenture and the World Bank’s IFC. We also built Google’s first regional startup accelerator, which became the model for Google’s global accelerator program. Google brought the grants, the training, and the stage. The mentors brought the global and regional expertise. The builders brought the future.
Today I run Andy[x], an independent research studio exploring open technology, creative systems, and human connection. Most of the work is in the open, exploring areas that drive my curiosity. Lately: as AI continues to grow in impact, how do we track its positive impact on human lives, beyond simply dollars saved for corporations?
Along the way: I spoke at Google I/O in 2021 and 2022. I did my first AI research at Caltech at sixteen, training neural networks to model ion channels, years before the tools and platforms caught up. I hold five patents in media and search. I’ve backed early-stage founders as an angel and investment fund LP.
The clearest view of what I’m thinking about lives on Andy[x]. The fuller record of my work is on LinkedIn, and the code is on GitHub.