Hey, I'm Collin.
I'm a product manager at Google where I've been building applied AI products for the last several years.
I'm currently working on Tapestry which is Google's moonshot for the electrical grid. Before Google I spent a decade as a founder of Zirtual and then Colony.
That’s me after receiving a $10k check for winning a startup pitch competition. Alternatively, you can see me in the midst of a 25km trail run, hangin’ with my family in Halloween garb, or a crumbshot of my homemade sourdough.
After 3 years at YouTube I've decided to take a new role at a Google Labs team building 0 to 1 Enterprise AI products.
I loved the brand of YouTube; it felt inspiring to work there. Yet being in Trust and Safety org was not the right fit for me. This new Labs team will tap into more of my early stage startup experience.
I knew this would be a better culture fit for me after attending their December all hands. One of the projects had just finished presenting their 2024 strategy and the Labs VP simply asked, “How can we do this 10x faster?” Quite a different and welcomed change compared to my experience at YT!
The other benefit of this team is getting to work in the fast moving waters of applied AI. I have a lot to learn, but I’m excited to be swimming in these currents.
After several months in the job market and with 4 good offers on the table, I took a job as a PM at YouTube at the end of Feb.
It's completely different from what I expected. Given the size of Google/YouTube, I was expecting the work to be narrow and—relative to my founder experience—boring. Yet, I expected the training and this-is-how-we-build-products to be world class. Neither is true. My scope and area of ownership is large which I love. However, I've been surprised to experience how bottom-up the product development process is at Google, and consequently how immature it is on the team I've joined.
Overall I'm enjoying it and it is a great place for me right now. I get to go deep into my craft of building products, get paid very well relatively to startup life, and experience new things amidst a great group of people.
At the end of September, I decided to leave Colony, the company I co-founded, after 4.5 years. I probably have an entire post explaining why and how I came to that conclusion, but suffice it to say it was the right time for me to move forward.
My main focus now is coding. For about 2-years, I’ve been learning to code part time. I’ve completed a Udacity nanodegree and built a few small projects. Yet I have never felt like I had the depth that I wanted.
That’s when I heard about Launch School. Their mastery-based pedagogy really spoke to me. And at the end of 2019 I decided to enroll. I’ve been working through that part-time, but now that I’m no longer at Colony, this is the main thing I’m focusing on.
I’m also in the job market for the first time in my adult life. I passed through Google's hiring process and was approved by their hiring committee earlier this year. I’m currently in the team match / offer stage with them. But other than that my experience interviewing so far has been mixed. As someone who has only ever been a founder, I’m a fairly atypical candidate. I’m a strong product-first generalist who’s comfortable asking questions, finding the right problems, and figuring things out in ambiguous environments. Yet I’m not as niched or vertically deep as many candidates applying to specific roles. I’ve seen this be both a pro and a con.
I don’t know where I’ll end up next, or when it’ll happen, but I do feel excited to enter this next stage of my career.