Academy of Art University

Stanford University

Harvard Business School

University of California, Los Angeles - The Anderson School of Management

National University of Singapore

Corporate Training Courses

Entrepreneur & Investor

Los Angeles, California, United States

Decentralized Finance.  Reinventing the future of money.

CoinCircle

Founder, CEO

Startup friendly seed/early stage boutique venture firm; investing in bold category redefining technologies and the brave dreams of the passionate entrepreneurs that forge positive new paths into the future.

Hyperspeed Ventures

Founder, Managing Director

This was a hybrid  "Director of Technology" and  "Director of Product"  role.  In this role, I created and staffed the initial "Snap Lab" team and led product development on what became Snap's Snapchat Spectacles.  Spectacles were redeveloped based on the acquisition of my startup company,  "Vergence Labs".   My startup built a variety of undisclosed VR / AR R&D concepts, but the product and tech stack most relevant when we were acquired was our fully developed and already shipping consumer smart-glasses product called "Epiphany Eyewear",  our stylish social video smart glasses created for sharing point of view video.During my time at Snapchat, I reported directly to the CEO (Evan), also often to the CTO (Bobby), and my newly formed R&D division, Snap Lab, reported to me.   I was responsible for the "yet-to-be-named" Spectacles product vision: roadmap, development milestones, features / user experience, design, engineering, product and technology development -- which I'm very happy to see stayed incredibly true to form even after my exit (except the circular frame front design was not part of my plan).  I had also left Snapchat before the decision (alleged by TechCruch) to over-produce "hundreds of thousands of pairs [...]" was allegedly made, which I would have never agreed to had I still been at the company.  While at Snapchat, my leadership duties included product vision, steering team into various new creative and technical areas, creating new staffing requirements and hiring several new staff to responsibly grow the Lab team prior to my exit, as well as daily morning team meetings (agile scrum) with the team, and weekly product vision, design and technology direction updates/reviews with the CEO and CTO respectively.  Carefully integrated my existing team (from the acquisition of my company Vergence Labs) into the new and unique one-of-a-kind millennial driven Snapchat company culture of "kindness" and "happiness" prior to my exit to pursue new ideas.

Snapchat, Inc.

Director of Snap Lab

Starting solo at inception in 2010 from raw idea phase; conceptualized, bootstrapped, fund-raised, recruited, prototyped, built, served, inspired, motivated & empowered the founding product and technology team -- starting from scratch; recruited a co-founder by 2011 and together, built the founding team. Envisioned and steered the company's bold pioneering vision to "Redefine the Future of Computing" by building new types of computers that can be worn as immersive 3d visors and stylish smart eyewear (before Google Glass or Oculus Rift). Further, against all odds and with fast-emerging fierce, better-funded competition, our incredibly talented lean small team relentlessly drove forward product development into real shipping v1 product with positive month over month revenue growth. Personally co-developed the Epiphany Eyewear design, branding, hardware/software stack and product hands-on with superb execution by our amazing team, including myself occasionally: writing code, sourcing key camera components, logo & interface design, plus leading design and software reviews. Created the company's product road-map vision and established the business model "Reality as a Platform"; building the company from idea to concept to design, engineering, development and manufacturing to branding, PR, marketing and sales, into a sustainable and scale-ready revenue generating mode that ultimately led to a successful acquisition with a very healthy exit.

Vergence Labs

Set direction for broad areas of software engineering; editorial, computer graphics, animation, color, and lean process automation technology, this position is a gateway to the leadership of technology for Disney Animation's films. Directly managing developers & project managers; accountable for time, budget, quality of engineering. This role was fundamental in shaping technology for the future of Disney.Responsible for the following diverse cross discipline technology teams, projects & initiatives:-Manage team of 23+ software engineers, technical directors and (2) project managers during busiest crunch time of $150+ million budget animated film -Manage team of 15 senior software engineers for animated film, "Tangled", work closely w/ team & stakeholders to define direction of production software features-"Product Owner"​ and leader/manager for total redesign of Disney's storyboard -> animation -> playback -> editorial Review tools including integrated 3D scene file non-linear editing. Spearhead collaboration w/ Sony & Pixar​. Wrote product specs, steered functional & technical direction of tool-set, ran feature prioritization meetings, initiated Scrum team. Responsible for direction, features, dev schedule, dev team, milestones.-Color science, LCD calibration project, early Pixar/Disney collaboration on HP DreamColor alpha hardware acceptance & api dev.-Manage Editorial/Avid system & post/Lustre engineering-Responsible for technical leadership of team w/ 40+ active software products-Work w/ CTO, management & finance for fiscal yr projections-Responsible for approx. $2.25 Million annual headcount allocation-Responsible for multi-year Multi-Million dollar 3rd party dev budget allocation-Responsible for my Business Unit: milestones, budget, project goals & schedule-Represent B.U. in Executive meetings w/ President, GM, EVPs, CTO, Producers & Managers-Mentor, career dev, team build, hire/fire, lay-offs, merit, reviews, vacations & conflict resolution

Walt Disney Animation Studios

Manager of Technology

Technical Directors, Pipeline & Software Engineers collaborating closely to build a robust and cutting edge re-usable high end asset development pipeline.  Staff, build, nurture and/or train departmental crews (based on size, scope & production demands) to handle hero digital asset development on a large scale, make front end development faster, and final results of the highest quality.  Assist bidding of future projects with production, steer development tests and concepts for upcoming work. Meet with clients, and partners, collaborate closely with directors and supervisors to realize the ultimate goals for the films and the studios making them.Notable projects included:Fantastic Four: Rise of The Silver Surfer300X-Men: The Last Stand

Hydraulx

Director of Technology

3D digital character focused software development & animation technology -- responsible for designing character based algorithms, tools, scripts, and "hero" digital creatures for tent-pole high-budget feature films; primary focus on complex realistic geometric deformations, digital pipeline / workflow automation & digital facial systems for feature films.  Both R&D and deploy to production new cutting edge software & methods.- Spiderman 3 – Develop and rig new muscle and skin creature physique system for the highly anticipated hero CG villain, Venom.  Also R&D methods for black goo, membrane and surface pod controls for the Black goo sequences as well as the final battle Venom goo creature.- Surf’s Up – Build hero cg wave system & ocean animation pipeline capable of surfing for hundreds of shots- Ghost Rider – Work w/ team to help implement and support anatomically based muscle & skin system plugins- Monster House– Work w/ facial team to create re-usable scripted hero facial rigging for all cg feature- Beowulf (facility level muscle & skin r&d)-I Am Legend (facility level muscle & skin r&d)

Sony Pictures Imageworks

Technical Supervisor

Assembled several teams to spearhead various successful 3D high-end cg focused projects with Alias - wavefront, Alias and Autodesk, including co-creating "HyperReal Facial Rigging" and the entire "HyperReal"​ series of products (books, dvds, online materials).  Personally designed and wrote a variety of software and scripts used in the series. This series was a top selling and highly rated product that was evenutally translated into a book series due to it's popularity.  Designed, developed and presented multiple Master Classes for the company many of which were redistributed widely via various digital content channels, titles including:  Character Pipeline and Tools, HyperReal Facial Rigging, HyperReal Facial Rigging II, HyperReal Creature Anatomy,  C++ Maya API Software Development and “Writing Creature Deformers”.

Autodesk

Technical Author, Speaker

- I,Robot - Lead team - create the hero digital facial performance system & software, several 3d animation pipeline software applications and shell scripts, as well as lead the crowd system team- 50th Anniversary Disney Commercials – Lead/Supervise character setup team, build 18 hero classic Disney characters (all cg squash/stretch) in 2 months.- Day After Tomorrow – Primary designer and developer of the crowd system software - procedural-people builder, scripted rig building, scene population, animation system, pipeline automation & distributed interactive rendering system for photo-realistic digital crowds.- Superbowl Commercial "Jordan vs Jordan" – Photo real 100% CG Michael Jordan, muscle based facial rig & deformation system.- EA Simms2 Commercial - Aeon Flux-The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (bid test) - this is the last project I worked on at Digital Domain, this was the digital bid-test that ultimately got the film green-lit. I worked as a Lead Technical Director on a small hyper-focused team doing the test; I built the facial system and many key aspects of the realistic digital face. After finishing the test, I was recruited by Sony Imageworks and accepted their offer before the green-light status of Benjamin Button was a known quantity.

Digital Domain

Lead Technical Director

Part of the founding team during a critical inflection point of this dot-com San Francisco startup -- was part of a very small core instrumental team that helped the company weather and survive the dot-com bubble collapse; when most failed, we persisted in developing our technology, ultimately leading into an acquisition by a Chinese company allowing it to grow into the industry leader it has become today.  Helped move company from top-floor SF high-rise offices, into the South of Market area (way before SOMA was cool), proceeded as a part of the core leadership team, helping to build a backbone of software, graphics, and system infrastructure including a large cluster of distributed computation servers and various advanced 3D front-end and web back-end server technologies.   Had a hands-on role implementing new software and systems, including building a 3D procedural digital human system: a very realistic high-end virtual-human creation software application that ran as a server and was able to create physiologically accurate and realistic 3D humans from numerical inputs interpolating through interpreted and segmented 3D scan data, morph-able into any body height or shape to match human dimensions from body measurements, photography or 3D scans. Worked closely with cross-discipline teams to achieve final shape of the procedural digital human in order to send into a rapid prototyping, 3D milling and manufacturing process to create real-life full scale human forms used for garment fitting. Wrote automation software and procedural 3D systems for automated cloth simulation.  Wrote dynamic web back-end image compositor application & system for dynamically viewing n-squared results based on limited combinations. Worked closely w/ designers, software developers & business team to automate the digital pipeline.   C++ software engineering, scripting (Perl, Python, etc) to automate manual tasks that could be distributed across multiple cpus via our task-queuing software.

Erick Miller

Erick Miller