My Story
I feel obligated to address the elephant in the room: how I’ve been able to work with TechCrunch, Gizmodo, MSNBC, and Bloomberg all before I turned 25.
My love of storytelling came from my work in coffeeshops, where I’ve worked since I was 14. I loved making coffee, and I took those jobs because I needed the money, but I especially loved the lives converging at my coffee counter. Baristas naturally assume the role of community therapist, and there I learned stories were all around me -- I just had to reach out and tell them.
In college, I wrote for my school newspaper, started our podcast section, and made documentaries. The documentary I was most proud of was about my brother, a Division One football player who struggled with concussions. The doc won a student a film festival, and was sent around by family and friends, landing me an internship with CNN.
During the pandemic, I offered my storytelling services to a local soup kitchen to inform our community of the increased level of need. Ultimately, I became a floor manager of that soup kitchen.
At a local branch of NPR in Connecticut, I wrote stories about Bridgeport’s Muslim community fighting for recognition in their schools. I also broadcasted on Hartford’s long history of school segregation. It was there I learned how storytelling could truly create change. I worked in Hartford through the end of college, and then moved to Brooklyn after an offer to work out of 30 Rockefeller Center for MSNBC — a dream come true.
After 7 months of waking up at 2AM to work on Morning Joe, I realized I wanted to be a reporter more than I wanted to be a producer. I took an opportunity with Bloomberg News. I knew nothing about finance, but I knew I wanted to write my own stories again. I could only rely on my journalistic instincts to get me through. The two pillars I relied on were: ask questions without fear of asking a ‘dumb question’ and understand that people are at the root of all stories, even in finance.
Two months in, I wrote Bloomberg’s first story on the Silicon Valley Bank collapse. Soon I found myself at the center of Bloomberg’s reporting on the largest financial crisis since 2008, writing four front-page features. The experience taught me I could write national news stories, and add to the world’s collective understanding on complicated subjects.
Since then, I’ve been covering AI — first at Gizmodo, now at TechCrunch. It’s been a little over two years, and I feel like I’m just getting started. I’ve interviewed executives from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Amazon, Anthropic, and more. I really do breathe tech reporting, and I wouldn’t rather be doing anything else. 10 years from now, I’d like to run my own tech media business.