I have spent my entire adult life—and most of my (beleaguered) childhood—engrossed in internet business and the functions that drive it. As a somewhat atypical child—emigrating war-torn Yugoslavia for the United States at the age of ten—I found a virtual refuge in the online world, and quickly became enamored with design, development, and marketing on the (then new) medium.
By high school, I founded Gamers.net, establishing the site as a preeminent gaming network that attracted millions of monthly visitors. The company was eventually acquired as my interest in gaming waned (along with inflated revenues of the dot-com boom), but a passion for online business & design remained. Twenty years, countless projects, and numerous ups-and-downs later, I'm still as obsessed as ever.
Most recently, I spent four years at Squarespace, a SaaS website publishing platform based in NYC. As an early employee (the headcount grew 25x during my tenure), I instituted the company's marketing architecture and scaled the growth initiatives, culminating in paying subscriber growth of >2000% and a valuation of over a billion dollars.
Prior to Squarespace, I was an early employee at a Seattle-based education startup, where I built the flagship consumer website and grew it into a top-500 property (Alexa, 2007–2010). This helped the company become one of the most profitable (net margin) and fastest-growing private companies in the US, leading to a $160M acquisition.
I currently reside in Manhattan and continue to work in tech, both professionally and as a hobby. I have a keen appreciation of good design, which plays a major role in every facet of my life, bordering on obsessive. I also teach Internet Marketing (DM435) at FIT; it allows me to impart my life's positive influences onto a new generation, which is incredibly rewarding.