Why I Joined Guild

Long before I worked in product design, I was thinking about trust. My parents served in the military and law enforcement, so I grew up in a household where fairness, safety, and responsibility weren't abstract ideas. They were part of everyday life. You looked out for the people around you. You built systems that people could depend on. You thought about how to make life a little easier and a little safer for your community.

Those values would shape the way I approached every product I would go on to design at McAfee and Meta. Whether I was helping people protect their data online or helping developers build software more efficiently, I found myself drawn to the same kinds of problems. How do you reduce complexity? How do you build confidence? How do you create experiences that people trust enough to feel secure and supported in their work?

Those questions have guided me throughout my career, and they're ultimately what brought me to Guild.

We've reached an inflection point with AI. A year ago, most organizations were asking what AI could do. Today, they're asking harder questions. Can we govern it? Can we audit it? Can we trust it with real business processes and customer data? 

The conversation has shifted from experimentation to production. Experimentation is forgiving. Production is not.

Once AI agents begin operating inside enterprise workflows, the expectations change. An impressive demo is no longer the measure of success. Success is measured by whether people trust the system enough to use it every day.

To me, that's fundamentally a design challenge. AI makes it easier than ever to build software, but great technology doesn't automatically become a great product. You can have the most capable model in the world, but if people don't understand what it's doing, why it's doing it, or when they should rely on it, they'll hesitate to use it. Even worse, they'll trust it in situations where they shouldn't. That's why I believe the next generation of AI products will be defined less by capability and more by confidence.

Design plays a critical role in closing that gap. It's about giving people the right visibility and control without overwhelming them — building systems transparent enough to earn trust, yet simple enough that people can focus on their work.

There's no shortage of AI companies right now, and most of them want to show you what's possible. Guild wants to show you both what's possible and what’s responsible. This distinction matters to me because it reflects the same design principles I've cared about throughout my career. 

Productivity and safety are not competing priorities; the best products deliver both. Guild understands that governance isn't something you add in after the fact; it should be a part of the experience from the beginning. When you build trust into the foundation, organizations can move faster because they have confidence in what they're deploying. That's a philosophy I wanted to help shape.

One of the things I'm most excited about is Guild's vision of enabling everyone to become a builder. For years, I've designed products primarily for developers, and that experience taught me an important lesson. Great tools don't lower the ceiling. They lower the barrier to entry.

The opportunity with AI is much bigger. Someone in finance, operations, or HR shouldn't need to understand how a model works to benefit from AI. They should be able to accomplish meaningful work in a way that feels intuitive and natural. As their confidence grows, the product should grow with them, revealing more capabilities without becoming overwhelming.

My goal is simple — for organizations to stop thinking about their AI infrastructure altogether. When governance is built in, workflows run smoothly and people trust the systems they're using. And the technology just fades into the background.

That's when AI stops being impressive and starts being useful. 

That's exactly what I'm excited to build at Guild.