about

i am a serial entrepreneur and technologist, having worked at 4 start-ups, founded 2 and sold 1.

i am currently the cto of local dirt, an online marketplace for local food. i am a husband, father of two (soon to be 3!) and a soccer nut. you can also find me on linkedin, facebook, and twitter.

for an informal recap of how i ended up here, read on…

i was a 9-year-old boy in turkey when i started programming in BASIC on my sinclair zx spectrum (an early PC). about 12 years later i graduated from queen’s university in canada with a computer science & math double degree.

i started my career at a start-up in canada as a software designer where i built core components of their flagship product and helped the company grow from sub-ten to 120 and thru to a successful ipo (tse:bwc) . i was responsible for a lot of their web development in perl and (later) java. i also helped them start their European operations and got to live in the UK for ~6 months.

i moved on to become a management consultant at deloitte and built web properties for fortune 500 such as morgan stanley, kraft and bell canada as well as a few start-ups.

later on, i co-founded and sold a small online career services company – in a very busy span of 18 months. in the meantime i also did some work at at&t canada where we rebuilt their online invoicing.

i moved to the bay area in 2006 to do my mba at the haas school of business at uc berkeley which i finished in 2008. during my mba, I interned at ebay motors with a great group of people where I led a study of their global product strategy. during my second year, i was an associate at o’reilly alphatech ventures, a venture capital firm in San Francisco.

during my mba, i started carsala with a classmate. we raised a seed round of venture capital and launched the company in 2009.

I have recently moved on to local dirt – an online marketplace for local food funded by o’reilly alphatech ventures and the national science foundation. We are a small team (for now) working to revolutionize our food system.