Hi, I'm Davis.

I grew up in Austin, Texas. As a kid I was deeply into computers, math, and science — and a relentless tinkerer. I was notorious for disassembling things around the house and breaking into my dad's toolshed to steal tools. I once took a saw and cut a giant hole into our garage.

I was lucky to get exposure to entrepreneurship young. My dad worked with founders and often talked to me about startups; in high school he'd let me sit in on sessions where he helped founders with pitches and strategy. That's what sparked my early interest in technology startups.

I studied Computer Science & Electrical Engineering at Duke. College is also where I fell for design tools — I taught myself Sketch and Photoshop for a few clubs. Digital design was a revelation: I'd never thought of myself as creative because I was bad at drawing and painting, but the more mathematical nature of these tools deeply appealed to me.

I loved studying CS and assumed I'd be a software engineer — but interning as one, I realized I didn't love the day-to-day. Product management turned out to be a much better fit: still close to engineers on interesting technical problems, but far more interdisciplinary.

After school I spent ~3.5 years at Google as a PM. I worked on the early developer platform for Google Home — trying to let people design conversational apps before LLMs (it turned out to be really, really hard). Then on the Pixel team, where two of the cooler things I shipped were Google's second-ever federated learning feature (for search in Settings) and, with a Brain team, a predictive battery model powering several phone features.

Google was a great place to start, but I'd always been more drawn to startups. A messy acquisition of HTC gave me a crash course in how hard merging two very different cultures can be, and I decided it was time to move on. I'd loved working on developer tools and had always been one of the most data-driven PMs around — so I was focused on dev tooling and data infra startups. Then a venture recruiter happened to reach out, and I figured I might as well interview.

I've now been in venture for ~6 years, and I absolutely love it. What drew me in was a love of learning, a sincere interest in technology and science, and a deep admiration for the startup journey.

I love gardening and cooking — especially cooking things I grow myself. I keep a small garden of 25+ plants and trees and am probably too addicted to YouTube cooking videos. I got into cooking from Good Eats, a great show about the science of food. My biggest flaw in the kitchen: I can never just follow a recipe.

I really enjoy weightlifting and have lifted consistently since high school. My best-ever lifts are a 425 lb deadlift, a 305 lb squat, and a 255 lb bench. Lately I've gotten very into kettlebell workouts.

There was a stretch where I was one of the most-read writers about Associate Product Manager programs on Quora — which led a friend and me to self-publish a book on breaking into APM programs out of college, The Product Diploma.

For a while, some college friends and I kept a blog called Five Guys Fun Facts, where we each wrote about one interesting thing we learned each week. I'm biased, but I think it's genuinely interesting.

As you can probably tell from my investments, I love data analysis. One of my earliest forays was figuring out how to analyze my core college friend group's iMessage data — the original analysis lives here.

Other things I love: sparkling water; "generative art" before the AI craze — using math and randomness to make abstract patterns via tools like Processing (example); landscape photography; and documentaries — a few favorites are Sour Grapes, Icarus, and Meru.