What was your first job?
I started my career at MSL Group, a PR agency under Publicis Groupe, helping global brands build their social presence on Weibo and WeChat in China — that’s when I realized I enjoyed connecting brands with audiences directly through social media. NowThis was my first full-time job in the United States. I joined as an intern in 2015, became a full-time Associate Producer, and eventually moved into analytics, which is where my true strength and passion lie. Understanding the full storytelling and content production process from my time in production made me a far more effective strategist and a better partner to our creators.

How do you stay creative when you are deep in data and analytics work?
I’m fortunate to work alongside some of the most creative people in the social media industry. They inspire me and remind me every day that my work isn’t just about numbers and dashboards, but about telling a story with data that can influence decisions and drive real change. I’m also an avid long-distance runner, and some of my best ideas come when I’m running along the Hudson River waterfront, letting the mental clutter clear out.

With platforms constantly shifting, how do you stay ahead of what’s coming next?
The algorithm is always changing, but here’s the thing: algorithms are ultimately designed to react to how audiences enjoy content, measured through signals like engagement, time spent, and shares. So instead of chasing something you can’t control, I focus on what you can. The authenticity of your content, a distinctive editing style, and how you genuinely interact with your audience. If you get those fundamentals right, you’re not just keeping up with the algorithm. You’re building the kind of audience relationship that performs well regardless of how the platform evolves.

On a practical level, managing dozens of social accounts gives us a massive dataset to work with. That cycle of pattern recognition, hypothesis, and validation is how we stay ahead. I’m constantly spotting emerging signals — a format quietly outperforming on one platform, a shift in how audiences engage with a certain type of content, a new feature getting early algorithmic lift. When I spot something, I treat it as a hypothesis. We test it quickly, measure the results, and if it validates, we scale it across our network. We’re not predicting what the algorithm will do next — we’re listening to what the audience is already telling us through the data.

Do you have any hobbies outside of work that influence how you think about audiences or content?
Vibe coding is my latest hobby. It’s the idea of building software by describing what you want in plain language to an AI, and having it write the code for you. When OpenClaw — an open-source AI coding assistant that’s been blowing up recently — first came out, I set it up and customized it to organize my notes and ideas automatically. One evening I thought, “I want to talk to it, not just text.” I described what I wanted, and had voice memo support working within five minutes. We’re living in a time where anyone with agency and drive can solve real problems without a full engineering team. What I didn’t expect is how much that process would align with product thinking, and how directly it applies to content. Vibe coding allows everyone to think like a product manager: identify a real problem, build fast, ship it, then iterate based on how people actually use it rather than how you imagined they would. That’s exactly how I approach content and audience strategy now.

You have been building AI-first products and workflows. What problem were you most excited to solve with that?
We’ve been leveraging AI extensively, but the goal should never be to create more slop. It should be to empower creators and solve real problems. So the part that excites me most is the high-impact infrastructure work: building automated and agentic workflows that streamline content operations — our internal dashboard, data pipelines, and campaign automations that used to take hours of manual work. AI coding tools have allowed my team to build and iterate on these systems faster than ever. That’s what lets us punch above our weight: a lean team creating outsized impact, so our creators can spend less time on operations and more time making great content.

You reach Gen Z and Millennials at massive scale. What do you look at to understand if a content piece or series truly resonates with those audiences?
Views get you reach, but engagement tells you resonance. We believe engagement rate is the leading indicator of whether a piece of content or a series truly connects with an audience. Anyone can buy reach — you can boost a post, run paid media, and inflate your view count overnight. But you can’t buy genuine engagement. When someone stops scrolling to leave a comment, share a video with a friend, or save it for later, that’s an earned action. That’s the audience telling you this content mattered to them. Platforms reward content that sparks real interaction, so strong engagement compounds — reaching new audiences that no amount of paid spend could guarantee.

But there’s also something data can’t fully capture: the vibes. You can’t put a metric on whether Gen Z genuinely loves what you’re making. That’s where our team becomes our secret weapon. NowThis is built by young people who are part of the very audience we’re trying to reach. We always tell our creators: you need to love and believe in the content you’re making, because if it doesn’t resonate with you, it won’t resonate with anyone else. When your own team genuinely gets excited about a piece, that’s often a stronger signal than any dashboard can give you.

What advice would you give an entrant when they package up their entry for the Jury?
In the AI era, the barrier to entry for “building” itself has been significantly lowered. The true differentiator is no longer what you built, but how you market it, distribute it, and connect with your audiences. That’s how I understand the “Built to” theme: not how many resources you spent building, but what kind of impact you created through what you built. Don’t just show us the product — show us the audience it moved. Show the jury the story of that impact.

Is your work built to move an audience? Enter your best projects by the Early Entry Deadline on April 24th for preferred early pricing.