I'm a mechanical engineer by trade and did consumer product design for the first 10 years of my life. That's what brought me to Block, I helped with the Square Terminal, and did early prototyping for what became the handheld.

But I'm a class of 2013 Bitcoiner and alongside my product design career I was always running nodes, miners, and on Bitcoin twitter.

At Block, I managed to get on the early Bitkey team, and at the time was also going deep on lightning. While we were designing and building Bitkey prototypes I was pitching for c= within Block, and the rest is history.

I would call my time at Block my first founding story, because we started c= from scratch, albeit with a bit more funding and support than most startups.

My father was an entrepreneur, so let's say the suggestion to start a company was always there :)