2013 – 2021 · Co-founder, Head of Product & CTO · Austin, TX
In 2013, every smart home device spoke its own language. Proprietary APIs, proprietary protocols, no interoperability. If you wanted to build a product that worked alongside locks, thermostats, sensors, and cameras, you had to engineer every integration yourself. The cost was enormous. The fragmentation was total.
There was no common layer. Yonomi set out to be that layer.
A cloud platform that spoke to every major smart home ecosystem and exposed a single, clean API to enterprise partners. Property managers could add smart access to entire buildings without touching device-level code. Insurers could tie premium discounts to live sensor data. Automakers could trigger home automation as you pulled into the driveway.
The platform integrated:
I joined as one of three co-founders in late 2013. Over seven years, I wore most hats — writing production code in the early days, leading customer discovery, building the product organization from scratch, hiring and managing a team that grew to 35+, raising $10M across Angel through Series A, and eventually leading the acquisition process.
The hardest part wasn't the technology. It was building an organization that could move fast without losing quality — and learning when to stop doing things yourself and trust the team you built.
As Lead Inventor, I filed multiple patents covering the core cloud-to-edge command propagation architecture that made Yonomi reliable in the real world — under degraded network conditions, behind NAT, on intermittent connections.
Yonomi was acquired by Allegion in January 2021. The platform continues to power Allegion's connected device ecosystem and serves enterprise clients globally. It's the thing I'm most proud of building.
See also: Ladle Cooking · Consulting · Patents