When I started talking to Code.org about joining in a leadership role I was drawn to the “global” aspect of the opportunity–to help reach children in countries with varying challenges that I could relate to from my personal experience in Chile. Mexico, Peru, Brazil, Colombia, Argentina–countries I know well from personal travel and some prior business experience in my software career, have *very* different classroom contexts than those of USA k-12 schools. Much lower prevalence of computers for individual student learning, and very often lacking in internet connectivity (and sometimes, dependable electricity). But just as importantly–a less obvious connection between CS education and the impact on a students life?

CS is not about “getting a job as an engineer”. CS is a *much* broader foundation for logical thinking that helps a student learn generally to gather, decompose, process, and create systems/process (algorithms) to solve problems. How does a CS education benefit a young girl in a rural village? I believe it will benefit her in all of her academic studies in the same way that basic numeracy and literacy are foundational, and will be applicable in her life not only as a ubiquitous user of 21st century technology (smartphones!) and also her professional life in any field: agriculture, manufacturing, transportation, hospitality, the small family business at the market, et.

As the leader of Code.org’s global team I got to work with an amazing group of multicultural colleagues from Chile, Korea, Peru, Slovakia, and India. Our small but mighty team carried the mission forward from other colleagues that came before us in the 2019-2023 era which translated key elements of our curricula and lessons, and reached well over 100,000,000 students around the world! Amaze-ballz stuff.

One of the first programatic value-ad projects I brought from my experience as a product manager in commercial software, was to lead our team towards a consensus super-view of all the market readiness elements which we have found to be end-to-end required for a transformational implementation of a national CS education framework and student-impacting curricula. We called this our Country Evaluation and Execution Model, and my colleague Doyeon came up with an awesome uber flow-chart that captured our institutional insights. Here’s the model:

The fun part was using this model to then “audit” each of our currently active countries to see which pieces of these programs were in place, essentially the “market readiness”. We asked our more than 100+ regional partners to contribute local-insights to these assessments and then generated country-by-country CEEM snapshots. The white-spaces are gaps in systems/programs that we deem essential for successful implementation of CS education for students. No bueno!

What emerged from this exercise is that our market readiness was spotty and incomplete in the vast majority of markets. Code.org had made primary investments in the USA ecosystem (our home country where our foundation is based and our donors and activities have prioritized 99% of our time and resources). Just having translated curricula is far from enough to drive changes across ministry of education policy priorities, curricula mapping to federal or state requirements that drive teacher and principal’s prioritization of courses, teacher training and development to build capacity (crucial!), infrastructure for classrooms, and assessment and data gathering to measure outcomes. This complexity of programs eludes most of our partners which don’t have the same level of donor support in their home-countries.

How could we maximize reach to benefit as many students as possible in our next phase of our mission, particularly as AI technologies and the need for AI Literacy are rapidly transforming all of education, and computational thinking and coding in particular? We had the help of a wonderful pro-bono team from McKinsey that helped us devise a country assessment rubric to prioritize our investments into high-impact, most-ready countries. The breadth and depth of their research was fantastic and I include just the simplest high-level slide to illustrate the themes of the rubric:

What emerged right at the tippy tippy top of the opportunities do help children in the world = India.

I first visited India in 1993 when i was a recent college grad and had not a care in the world and the privilege of $3000 that I had saved up working as an assistant editor on music videos and commercials while in college in Los Angeles. Those savings propelled me and a friend across northern India on a rigid budget of $10 a day–which we maximized in Darjeeling, Varanasi, Agra, Delhi, Jaipur, Jodhpur, and Jaisalmer among other wonderful cities and villages. Of course I adored every moment of every day. The bustling beauty of all the people, the food, the music, natural wonders, and history (which i had studied in college).

Over the last year my focus with the organization has been to seek a founding Managing Director who would partner with us to found a new Indian non-profit, and partner with us to build a “code.org of India” that can leverage the collected insights and expertise of our movement in other markets, but build them in a entirely localized context with a Indian team, for the Indian student, in a entirely native Indian way. Saleem joined us in October 2025 and working closely with him over the last 4 months sharing everything I have learned and could offer as catalyst inputs has been my #1 project.

With Saleem firmly in place I’m now transitioning from a full time position with Code.org into an ongoing advisory volunteer role as Secretary of a Global Advisory Council that will support Saleem and his team in India with a collection of mentors from traditional business, enterprise software, education, and other sectors. This is new and exciting. Code is actively building a network of donors and advocates among the Indian Diaspora tech-community here who will directly support Code.org’s impact reaching 10s of millions of students in India.

To be continued with details soon!

I’ve had a long journey with sleep routines and performance. Starting in college i experienced a major bout of disregulation that had me wide awake tossing and looping with hyperactive thoughts, tortured by the need for sleep and the inability to turn off my brain and take a break. This led to a cycle of sleep-anxiety, palpable fear of how the lack of good sleep would ruin my next day and turn into a cycle of anxiety and sleeplessness.

At different times for the next 20 years I would have flare-ups. Often I could sleep just fine, and then for weeks at a time this sleeplessness would return. I learned to cope by sometimes embracing the nighttime active-brain, and just getting up and doing work, watching movies, or otherwise taking a break from being in bed, awake, and caught-up in the anxiety. This was “managing” my problem, but not really a solution.

Then about a decade ago i discovered the CURE in an unexpected moment. Cristina started to use a podcast to go to sleep, in which a man reads nonsense sentences in a monotone voice endlessly. She found the voice soothing and as a routine, formed her “sleep ritual”. The particular podcast didn’t work for me at all (in fact it was annoying!). But. it got me wondering about a podcast-ritual that might work for me. My challenge was mostly not falling asleep, rather, it was falling BACK asleep when waking up at 2 or 3 am.

So: i explored getting a pair of “bedtime headphones”, and coupled these with a series of podcasts — which work like a MAGICAL ELIXIR. I am now on gen3 headphones that are delightful, and have found my sweetspot with podcasts.

For headphones I now sleep with the Ozlo side-sleeper buds. I fall asleep on my side and tend to flip left/right side throughout the night (well, when my cat’s aren’t on my chest or next to me–wouldn’t want to disturb their sleep!). These buds (a) last 12+ hours (b) have a killer feature where they transition to white-noise sounds, after i fall asleep (they sense when i’m asleep), (c) i can wear just 1 and switch between ears periodically–this allows me to still have situational awareness to hear my alarm/etc. but also (d) help reduce the distraction of my wife’s (sometimes) sleep-apnea soundtrack, (e) are really comfortable even when my head is against the pillow. These are my 3rd product and best i’ve found for my needs. I highly recommend–have been using my first pair for 3 years, they are workhorses and I use almost every night.

For podcasts… the trick was to find a mixture of content that i could tune into and focus on, and, a voice/style of chatter that was conducive to (a) helping me FOCUS on the podcast (to minimize my racing mind thinking about work, social drama in my life, etc.) (b) being interesting but not SO interesting that my mind can transition to sleep-land (c) routine oriented with fresh new episodes/content on a weekly basis, so I have something that feels new each week.

These criteria led me trough several history and literature discussion podcasts, to where i now have ended up which is sports and cinema. Go figure?

Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast, specifically his 6 part (12+ hours) episodes about the war of the pacific in World War 2 — AMAZING — was my gateway. I love his content, and his voice. So i would drift off and then come back the next night, got me through about 5 months of sleep routine! Whether for sleep or otherwise, this podcast is awesome and the Supernova in the East on Japan / WW2, one of the most interesting things i’ve ever listened to.

Bill Simons is my GOAT, I like his voice, and he talks about sports with great guests on his main podcast (the Bill Simons Podcast) and then with some film nuts, talks about old movies on The Rewatchables. He releases sports episodes several times a week and a film episode 1x a week. I use these each night to get into sleep mode, asleep (usually in 10-15 minutes), and then crucially BACK to sleep usually 2-3 times a night when i wake up. I just hit play on my ipad/phone, and am usually back asleep within 5 minutes.

yeah–totally wacky… BUT, IT WORKS! i feel like i have a newfound super power.

You can book an appointment for therapy with top San Francisco Latina therapist at Courageous Counseling’s site.

Home

CodeAI India site has not yet been built. Information about Code.org’s India plans includes details about the partners and team at the Compute and Learn Foundation, India.

India is home to the largest education system in the world, with over 270 million K–12 students and nearly 250 million youth aged 15–24—a population almost equal to that of the entire United States. This young demographic represents extraordinary potential, but today that potential remains largely untapped. Roughly 45% of Indian youth are unemployed or underemployed, not because they lack talent, but because they lack access to the skills that the modern workforce demands.

The urgency could not be greater. Artificial Intelligence is rapidly transforming every sector—from healthcare and agriculture to finance and education. Yet, India’s students are not equipped for this new reality. Computer Science (CS) and AI education remain luxuries, accessible primarily to urban, English-speaking children in private schools which are approx 31% of the overall mix, while the vast majority i.e 69% of India’s students enrolled in government schools —many of whom learn best in regional languages—are left behind.

The good news is that momentum for change is building. India’s National Education Policy (2020) and the National Curriculum Framework (2023) both emphasize computational thinking and AI literacy as essential twenty-first-century skills. The time is ripe to ensure that every child in India—not just the privileged few—has the opportunity to learn the language of the future, however domestic solutions to meet this opportunity do not exist yet,  presenting an opportunity for world-leading established solutions to be localised and extended to help deliver the learning outcomes.

Shakira’s foundation has been very active in building several model schools with very strong infrastructure in marginalized communities in several cities. We visited some of these schools and I was moved to hear the administration describe how the entire community had been uplifted by the presence of a modern school with meal services, playgrounds, performing arts centers, and libraries and computer labs.

Our facilitators led 2 day workshops for teachers that have had zero prior experience teaching computational thinking and computer science. It is very inspiring to see how quickly the teachers get the concepts and their genuine engagement in the potential of these curricula for their students.

Traveled with my son for a week of magnificent sites across the northern triangle between Cajamarca, Chiclayo, and Trujillo. The trip was originally intended to lead us to Chachapoyas by road from Cajamarca, but a torrential set of global-warmed rains wiped out the intended road and a social strike disrupted the alternative route—so we improvised with our wonderful tour operator Time to Travel Cajamarca and designed this lovely route. We had a private driver/car for the week and enjoyed each area and the absolutely magnificent archaeological sites of the Moche, Sican, and Chimu civilizations we visited.

Our overall route:

• From USA we landed in the evening and stayed at the Lima airport adjacent hotel (100 meters from arrival desk) — very convenient and comfortable. Flew in the AM to Cajamarca, 737 scale plane, small airport but several flights per day direct, about 1hr fly time.
• In Cajamarca we enjoyed several days of local tours to the Cumbemayo hiking area, historical city center, and Banos del Inca and las Ventanillas de Otuzco.
• Long day in car via very good road to Chiclayo, with magnificent visit to the Kuntur Wasi archaeological site.
• From Chiclayo a day dedicated to various “Huacas” which are sacred temples and pyramid complexes, at Ventarron, Sican, Tucume, their associated museums (wonderful), and great meals in Lambayeque and beach walk in Pimentel.
• Long day in car to Trujillo with stunning stop-off at Huaca de Ojo de Brujo which might have been the overall highlight — with Senora de Cao museum.
• Base in Trujillo for a few days for visits to Chan Chan and Huaca de la Luna y Sol, with return flight from major aircraft to Lima (Trujillo the 3rd largest city of Peru)

Here are some of the Cajamarca pics:

Here we are at the Kuntur Wasi site:

Tucume and Sican major sites near Chiclayo:

Ojo del Brujo en route from Chiclayo to Trujillo (closer to Trujillo):

And the major sites in Trujillo, Huaca de La Luna and Chan Chan:

And, some of the *many* wonderful meals… Peruvian food, the best:

So, as a first step to unveiling our amazing work delivering computer science, computational thinking, and artifical intelligence education to millions of kids in over 100 countries all over the world, today i hacked together a new microsite that surfaces details of our programs and courses in Spanish, Hindi, and Korean. This will be followed with as many as 30 additional languages, as I study the webcrawling and search traffic patterns, to best connect these searches back to our curriculum and “app”, the Code.org LMS (courses, teacher administration, professional development, and actual classroom activities for kids).

The code.org materials in Spanish are comprehensive and delightful and edited by yours truly with help from Karina my colleague, as we are both Chilenos!

This has been super fun project as I can see immediate impact with traffic in multi-lingual queries, reaching the site and much of it converting to sign-ups and create-new-account buttons. Kudos to Webflow, such an amazing website building tool, has been a pleasure to use.

Over the period of the project the search volume was pretty good and in particular the average search position was stellar (~5). However despite tagging these pages with the language code and native content in Thai, Italian, Tamil, Hindi, etc. — the primary domain of code-org continued to receive significantly more traffic even though it was serving english page results to Thai/Tamil/etc. queries. Here is the volume of search traffic to the microsite:

And by comparison, look at just the search traffic from one country Thailand, in that same period:

So quite an interesting experiment. Having a native Thai landing page, made a dent (580k impressions v 3.13 to the primary domain english page), but the click through rate was 1.6% (to the Thai page) vrs. 43% (to the english page on the primary domain).

The take-away for me is that (a) more time was needed to establish authority of the subdomain, (b) using a subdomain a huge disadvantage especially on a 10 year old, trusted main domain.

The good news is today we are ready to fold this traffic back into our primary domain and have staged new marketing website pages using a new CMS (Contentful), and that system is connected to an awesome new TMS (Translation Management System) called Localizejs. With this new TMS we are going to radically reduce our cost and time to market, and most importantly, extend coverage of translation into 22 languages for more of our student curricula and thus reach more students and teachers.

Here’s the new student marketing landing page for code.org in Thai, on the main domain. Now Thai queries should rank for our https://code.org/th/global.

For 2026 we are starting to focus on India as a very strategic market for us to expand computational thinking, computer science, and AI literacy education of K-12 students. Offering these materials in Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Marathi, and Telugu will now be possible thanks to our amazing new AI translation workflows using Localizejs.

• Code.org in Hindi
• Code.org in Telugu
• Code.org in Marathi
• Code.org in Tamil
• Code.org in Kannada

And here’s a general overview of all of Code.org’s programs in India.

And here is a complete list of the initial 22 languages we are supporting with this new translation platform:

I’ll be writing more but wanted to start with gathering some photos from our work in LATAM region, my colleague is in Belize this week conducting teacher training and when she shared some snaps, I was very moved emotionally. I was in Belize in 1993 back-packing after college, and was flooded with happy memories and a strong sense of mission/impact for the work I’m now doing every day.

In April 2025 I had the pleasure of visiting Barranquilla and Cartagena Colombia as part of our collaboration with the Pies Descalzos foundation, of Shakira (yes, the Shakira) fame. The foundation does lovely work building modern schools and inspiring the communities and local governments to rally around improved education and arts programs for kids in government schools.

In May 2025 I combined my personal vacation with my son to norther Peru, with some collaboration with our partner in Peru, Code en mi Cole, who conduct Hour of Code workshops and teacher training for CS education across the country. In Lima we attended a symposium on the future of work that discussed how AI and technology is disrupting the skills required for the modern jobs across many sectors of the economy of Peru. And Code en mi Cole held an event on tech education at the Museo Metropolitano de Lima where we met several city and national government officials and presented code.org to ~100 teachers who attended to learn more.

In Lima we joined 2 tv programs to share Code en mi Cole’s plans for computational thinking programs and I got to practice my pitch in Spanish! Hilarious, if you ask me. Go ahead, laugh!

And another interview, this one i think is only on cable itself, and here on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1BVUZ2JciL/?mibextid=wwXIfr

Hopefully both Colombia and Peru will continue to implement education for technology and AI literacy in their national, broadly accessible and inclusive programs in government public schools.

I’m flying in to Osaka from LAX, a great option to avoid having to arrive and depart from Tokyo and the resulting extra travel to to/from, and generally high costs of Tokyo. From Osaka I can get to lovely Kyoto by train on day of arrival and make that my first few days base camp to get over jetlag, and pick up my Rail Pass when i’m ready to start my train rides.

I’ve been to Nara several times, it is marvelous. But there are SOOO many things to see, Todaji Temple, is indeed, amazing (have visited 2 times before and blown away both times).

I spent the day visiting near-Nara temples and walking 15m (30,000+ steps), yikes. These temples are beautiful but each requires some gymnastics to reach by train. From Nara they are a good 45 minutes or so of walk/train combos. Was a great first day here.

A rainy day in Kyoto afforded me time to get 9 miles of walking around town and superb coffee stops everywhere. Tons of single source pour-overs and delicious flavors. Of course you then have to carry your coffee cup around for hours, as there are no public garbage cans anywhere in japan!

Day trips today to both Iga Ueno and Hikone castles were delightful; nearly 5 hours cumulatively from Kyoto to get to the two and back, but I made real progress on my super lengthy and involving book, Infinite Jest.

The first real leg of this trip is the venture to the north coast of Matsue with a stop-off en route via Okayama to the town of Bitchu-Takahashi. The JR Train stations usually have locker storage, I was able to pop bag at the station and set out on a lovely 1hr each way hike up to the top of the hill where the Bitchu-Takahashi castle was protected by a funny Cat-Lord!

After a day around Matsue I’ll hit Izumofor some more sites en route down the coast to Hagi.

During the lovely sunny day I took a morning visit the absolutely stunning Adachi Museum of Art which punched hard in both its insanely beautiful Japanese gardens, and, one of the most interesting modern art (20th century) collections of Japanese paintings and ceramics. Unfortunately I could not snap pictures of any of the art, there were some stunning gorgeous works and really compelling variations of style that I have never seen anywhere else.

Izumo en route to Hagi turned into a adventure. The Izumo Taisha shrine was great but maddeningly, the main shrine can only be peeked at from afar as it is surrounded by a wooden wall in its entire perimeter. The main shrine is a HUGE wooden structure, 100ft+ tall it would seem. I could only marvel from afar.

As expected the train ride along the north-western coast hugging the Sea of Japan was absolutely delightful. However strong winds knocked out the tracks (fallen tree?) and i had to divert to Yamaguchi for the night… tbd if I make it to Hagi.

Early start for first coffee arrival at the Yūtoku Inari Shrine 祐徳稲荷神社which has a nice 20 min hike to a nice viewpoint overlooking the valley, passing through a few hundred tori gates which are fun for photography.

Hit Dazaifu on my way, grabbed lunch and perused the town but must say it was jammed with visitors from China snapping pics and enjoying the CNY (all the power to them) which kind of bust the mood of being out and about solo, so took a long walk up into the woods and to some minor Buddhist temples. Then made my way to Fukuoka which has the fast Shinkansen terminal so I hit the town for some extra steps, reading time at a cafe, and a yakitori dinner at the station before heading home. 25k steps this day, rounding out my first week in Japan where I averaged well over 20k steps each day—woohoo!

Arrived at Beppu the famous onsen (hot springs) town, where I got rained on pretty hard but still enjoyed the town tremendously. My little hotel (like I’m sure all hotels in town) had a great built-in onsen bath as well as private bath areas that I rented for my own splash party.

Challenging weather day although I did make it to the lovely Aoshima island for a brisk walk and a delightful $6 lunch.

So onwards to the southernmost city of Kyushu, Kagoshima. A+ for the cute guest house, only $40 bucks a night with real charm and great views.

I’ve seen dozens of restored samurai homes, but this one in the Senegan garden’s right adjacent to my lodging was beyond adorable. I wanted to move in—so inviting to walk about on the tatami floors and the peek-a-boo views of the volcano and bay.

If I had more time and it was summer (a lot of nature parks and islands to see, not so good in winter) I would try to hit these places: Kitakyushu, Yutoku Inari Shrine, Yoshinogari Historical Park, Takachiho Mountain Town, and mostly the sub-tropical green island of Yakushima Island which Japan-Guide rates as a 3 star attraction (aka, i trust them, awesome!)

And, the exchange rate and whatever else is going on in Japan with the economy—wow, super affordable. Delicious meals for $6-10 dollars for lunch (set meals). And a great sushi lunch for $25!

Ok so Kumamoto was a bit ordinary in that i didn’t get a distinct vibe. The castle got really hit hard in the earthquake a dozen years back, and is essentially a construction zone / modern recreation—one of my least favorite Castles and that’s saying a lot, since I’ve seen nearly 20 of them!

After a layover and delicious meal in Hiroshima (love this town!) i took the early ferry today to Matsuyama on Ehime island.

For my birthday I did out and back day trip to Ozu & Uchiko, about 40 minutes by train from Matsuyama. Both are super cute but very very small towns, and because it was low season, there were only a couple dozen tourists in the towns and a lot of the shops and cafes were closed. The wax museum in Ozu was a hit, some rich family from the 1880s who made a killing in wax production. And a rich guy’s mansion who margined labor in the Philippines in 1910s, built a mansion for himself in Uchiko. So—rich guys from the 19th century who built mansions in their home towns, was the theme.

On my way back to mainland and the shinkansen to Nagoya I took a hike around the Kotohira Shrine. The steps up the hill weren’t as bad as the hype—took about 30 minutes.

From Nagoya I spent the day finishing my book and riding out and back to the Ise Shima shrines on Shima Penninsual (Ise), which didn’t allow any meaningful photography (out of religious respect) which means I have little to show here, but it was really stupendously beautiful. Infinite Jest was a marvelous read, I’m glad I got through it. Kind of sad it is over.. time for a new book.

Got a lot of steps in walking between the shrines, still holding my 7 day average at 25k steps a day, which has to be a personal best in a long time?

After getting stuck in a 2hr line to try the local Tonkatsu chain, i got my butt out early to a random location of the chain and had a very tasty brunch at 10:30 am!

Kanazawa was delightful as always, cold and snowy.

And to Tokyo to catch Adam finishing the Tokyo marathon.

And to Hokadate where it REALLY is snowing.

On way south to break up the long distance back to Tokyo hit Sendai as a regional hub (eg: cheap hotel by train station) and made it up to Yamadera Temple near Yamagata.

And finally a sunny day after a week, although still plenty chilly. Took the leisurely walk around the bay dotted with cute islands over at Matsushima.

Nikko!This is a fabled 3-star destination according to Japan-Guide, full of amazing ornate temples and a nice nature setting. Particularly intrigued by the Toshogu Shrine.

Ran out of time and didn’t make it to Aizu, Geibikei Gorge, Hiraizumi, Morioka, Aomori, and Hirosaki so those remain for future visits. Even with 4 full weeks, couldn’t see everything!

Kamakura last 3 days were a nice relaxing break for some visits with friends and first meals in 4 weeks with someone else (not alone).

Amazing trip. Really lovely last days with Adam and his family, visiting the Team Lab museum and grabbing a pastrami sandwich at the club in Tokyo before heading to airport..

Having read and consumed a lot of media on psychedelics in the last year I must say I’m struck by how male dominant the space can feel, I’m sure April’s approach will enhance empathy and understanding for women seeking voices of women in this space.

Her YouTube channel is a great place to grab the many podcast episodes on psychedelic mushroom types, microsdosing protocols, healing and mental health themes, etc.

I volunteered to help April improve the online presence for the 80+ episoides she had created from 2020-2023 and spent the last few weeks using a variety of fun tools to port the site, add a ton of rich meta-data, and do some SEO tuning to try to improve traffic and discovery.

I set out to enhance the visual appeal of the podcast series by creating all new episode covers/art to unify the look and feel of the series. I wanted accentuate the woman-first energy of the series and April’s vision for helping women learn and use these entheogens in their personal journeys. Using a combination of Adobe’s Firefly and Midjourney tools (AI image synthesis from text prompts) I iterated through several hundred prompts to generate really fun concept art.

I primed the AI with a lot of variations to try to get more diverse and inclusive images out of the system. Midjourney was particularly problematic in giving me skinny, white, unhealthy looking “model” women that looked like they were straight out of a fashion shoot. To get more average/normal looking women of different ethnic/age/body types was a lot harder than it should be! I used yellow/green for Cannabis articles, purple/orange for Ketamine, and pink/red/blue for Shrooms. This color segmentation gave me groups of images that look great together on the landing pages.

I had a lot of fun porting the website from Squarespace over to a Elementor hosted WordPress installation. We used Airtable to organize the meta-data for the 80+ episodes, a WordPress plug-in called AirWPSync to sync fields from Airtable into ACF custom fields in WordPress, and Elementor’s data-binding to connect template blocks to the fields. The result is the site is now database rendered and we can add podcast episodes and manage all episode pages, from a single template. Yay.

I’ll now keep an eye on how Google crawls the new content to see if we can improve organic discovery to this rich content. Super enjoyed this project and excited to update this post as I have more results to share.

I did my research to find a Ayahuasca retreat using a variety of sources, and found the review website AyaAdvisors.org to be particularly useful as it has hundreds of first person accounts from visitors who have journeyed at the various facilities in Peru, Brazil, Costa Rica, Mexico, Jamaica, and other countries where this medicine is revered and practiced in safe and legal facilities that are overseen by very experienced by guides.

The Sapan Inka retreat center is in the town of Urubamba in the Sacred Valley, about 90 minutes from Cusco the regional capital and center of tourism in Peru. I chose the Sacred Valley for my retreat as opposed to one of the Amazon jungle basin centers which are common near Iquitos and Pucalpa—Ayahuasca comes from the Amazon after all, and the Shaman masters from various Ayahuasquero traditions are all Amazon provenance. However, i personally feel a very strong connection to the Andes and the high altitude air, clouds, expansive vistas, and indigenous tradition of the Inca empire and native and mestizo people of this region.

They say that Ayahuasca “calls you” which for me it very much did, to this place and at this time in my life. I had made my reservation to visit Cusco for the 4th time of my life (i first came in 1993, and have returned several times since—this is my favorite place to visit as a tourist on earth!) and had not originally planned to try ayahuasca. It was only months after I already had my ticket and some of my airbnb and hotels booked, that I felt the call to research and then book a spiritual retreat. It was amazing, the feeling of “oh, this is my calling, i feel it”. Like being summoned by the plant medicine. I know that sounds cray cray, but it is genuinely how it felt.

I stayed 9 days before the retreat in a marvelous Airbnb home in the town of Urubamba. From here I focused on my diet (no meat, no salt, no oil, no spice, no coffee, no sex!) and did a lot of reading, walking, relaxation exercises. I also did day trips to Ollaytaytambo and Pisac, cute as heck towns with amazing Inca archaeological sites.

I did a ton of journaling before, during, and after my journey. This was a fundamental part of the experience, it helped me prepare, reflect, and integrate all of the amazing elements i was shown by the medicine journey.

Here are some of the many vistas from my hikes in the valley in the week leading up to my ceremony. The Sacred Valley and its energy, fresh air, amazing clouds, Inca sites, and general “magical” energy, were a central part of the overall experience for me.

On AllTrails there were a few hiking routes, either from the valley itself (2k feet straight up, not appealing) or various 7-10 mile hiking routes from Chinchero area or from Tambomachay in Cusco. While several blog posts outlined how to do these routes solo, i wanted the safety of a guide (since I was traveling solo) for such a rural and steep climb. I found Victor, a wonderful local guide, using GetYourGuide app, and together from 6am Cusco departure we made the amazing trek. I highly recommend.

The highlights:

• Stunning climb to 14,400 ft pass during the first 90-120 minutes of the hike. Not as difficult as it sounds, the slope gradient was mild.
• Beautiful expansive views of the valley below from the pass, and as you descend, peek-a-boo views into side canyons and along the main cordillera of the Andes.
• Changing flor and grasses as you descend from 14,000 feet all the way down to 9,000. Walking poles really made this easier on my knees. Path is solid, not dangerous or loose.
• The amazing Inca city, with very well preserved square, fountain, grain storage rooms, ceremonial and high-class residences including the best 2 story preserved building I’ve seen at any site, in the amazing city of Huchuy Qosco.
• Amazing views from the Huchuy Qoscco main plaza, a football field sized flat grassy space with astonishing 180 degree views of the valley—it feels like you are floating on a flying spaceship.
• Even more dramatic views as you descend rapidly the 2,000 feet from the Inca site, down to the city of Lamay.

Here’s my AllTrails route which was a variation of the route that others had posted in the app, similar but different starting point. The Tambomachay starting point I’m told is the “original Inca trail” and would have been fun to attempt, a little longer by 4 miles.

• Google Maps is great for manhattan, very easy to take subway everywhere.  You can use your iphone to automatically enter the subway, you have to turn on TRANSIT feature in Wallet, then, you just put iphone on the reader and you beep in/out.  Not sure about the kids…
• Broadway musicals are amazing, shows with lots of singing and dancing and great costumes.  NYC and London are the two best places in the world to see these type of shows, they are really incredible.  The Lion King is superb, amazing costumes and songs and the kids will love.  This website is the industry website (the group of theaters team up to market the industry) and has links to tickets.  All the shows are great, just a matter of finding family friendly ones.  They are SUPER.  You can sometimes get same-day tickets for really cheap, if you go the day of to Times Square booth at 10am there is a booth, and you can get really cheap last minute tickets.  This last-minute booth is THE OFFICIAL booth of the industry–so safe, and cheap.  They want to sell out the shows so they tend to release the tickets to that the theater is full, better for everyone.  but, since you only have 4 days, better to plan ahead and just buy–i use SeatGeek app sometimes, or, the show website if there is available.
• The “East River Ferry” is super fun and cheap.  It is a public ferry much like a subway, that stops in various places and goes north/south up and down the east-river, so you get great views of the city.  It is only like $3 a person… so a really fun way to get a boat ride with nice views.  We sometimes take between manhattan and brooklyn, such as getting on here and getting off here.  That gives you a nice 20-25 minute ride, and you get off in DUMBO which is a fun neighborhood in Brooklyn.  
• In Dumbo (very fun outing), great coffee from japan brand, and walk along the water-front where there is kid playgrounds and fun things to see and GREAT views of manhattan.  Walk here, here, here.  If you take the ferry to Dumbo, you can take subway back to manhattan very easy.  Kaustubh and Tywen live in Brooklyn, so close to here.
• The “HighLine” is a old railroad track that has been turned into a walking path, super pretty and not too long for kids.  Start here at this new mall Hudson Yards which has some nice tall buildings and a very very high up observation deck (much better than the Empire State Building observation deck which is famous but old and not great), walk along here, to here,  and end up here at the Little Island which is delightful for kids.  If still energy, all of this water front park is also fun and has more pretty park so keep walking south along the river.  Our favorite adult modern art museum is here too, The Whitney, so you can do that quickly so the kids don’t get bored–30 minutes worth it, always good art and a neat building with good views.

• Central Park is amazing and big and has lots of really pretty areas to walk and it is safe during day (at night be more careful of course).  There is a famous zoo, pretty lake paths, and much more.  You can rent bikes or skates or other wheels and poke around. The natural history (night of museum movie) museum is right by the park so good to do that on same day.
• The 9/11 memorial park is a must see, the museum is there too but we haven’t gone–maybe too sad.  but the park and fountains are lovely and the buildings around there nice and close to this famous subway station (famous architect, worth quick visit) and famous Wall Street statue where the financial center is.
• Tours and ferry to statue of liberty leave from here if you want to actually stop on the island where the statue is to get close to it.  What a lot of people do instead, is take the FREE ferry to Staten Island which goes right by the statue… we’ve done this.  It is a nice commuter ferry full of locals, and you can see the statue great.  Just take ferry to staten island, and then get back on and take back.  It is free, or very cheap, can’t remember.  The tour is expensive, crowded, etc.
• The “wangfujing” of nyc is called Times Square, super crowded with stupid tourist brands but must see, and, the broadway shows are here, so good to go the day you go to a broadway show.  
• Washington Park is famous and worth walking through, safe, but you will not think it is, lol… it has more street people and students as it is center of NYU University.  This is where people play chess outdoors (in many movies) and lots of other famous movies take place here.  The neighborhood just south is full of restaurants, lots of college kids.
• Chelsea Market is a nice “market” with lots of restaurants and things to see in a nice neighborhood.

Some restaurants in NYC to try

• Most good restaurants in nyc use RESY app for reservations (owned by american express).  
• This is a really famous pizza restaurant in Brooklyn, 100+ years old I think.  If you go to DUMBO during the day, you could try to go to this restaurant for lunch (they may only be open for dinner) or get there right when they open for early dinner.  VERY GOOD pizza.  Super famous, no reservations.
• Eataly is a super fun lunch “italian market” full of dozens of different italian food stalls, pizza, fish, sandwhiches, cheese/meat plates, etc.  They have indoor and outdoor seating… it simulates a “italian market” and is a famous chef/owner.  Really fun and great food.  It is by nice park/plaza, and, there is a “harry potter world” thing i always see big lines for and lots of kids, never been.
• Shukkette is a sensational and super popular middle eastern restaurant hard to get reservations family friendly, use RESY app.  Same owners have Shuka which in some ways is just as good and in a better neighborhood close to SOHO, so either one is great.  
• Brunch in soho at this place is amazing, a little fancy, but pretty and very special (indoors best, outdoors too hot)… requires reservations on RESY.  This is also good for brunch, famous but #2 of these.
• Near soho, famous ice cream with 20 minute lines, good for after dinner at night on a hot night.  Fun to wait in line and people watch.
• if you miss china, sizchuan, and 
• Korea town GREAT KOREAN, our #1 bbq, new york times favorite a bit fancier, and a general tofu/korean that is superb and cheap and has a michelin bib gourmand (some waiting out front)   
• there are SOOOOOOO many great restaurants, i think the best food in the world… so you really can’t go wrong.  if you tell me what neighborhood your airbnb is in i can make more recommendations.

Matt Silverman is an amazing creative director and he and his team have done 100s of amazing projects for big co’s and startups: Lucid Motors, MSC Cruises, Google Material Design, Sony, and many others.

Particularly awesome recent project is the work iBelieveInSwordfish completed for MSC Cruises.

Matt Silverman is an incredible director and creative designer of stories of all types, i’ve done projects with him over the last 30 years.

Here’s some art:

The waves were happening.

Diablo Canyon in the myst

And the snakes are out and about, rattlers abound!

Attractions in town include the beach which extends for over 20 miles to the south.

The Pismo Preserve is a gorgeous ocean front hiking area right in town, accessible from the beach, which meanders through rolling hills and offers panoramic coastal views.

Overview of Pismo Beach Hotels

Pismo Beach 32-ish hotels to choose from ranging from luxury-aspiring properties, good value 3 star vacation destinations, and budget friendly inns that have charismatic “funk” of a bygone era. Pismo is a beach town first and foremost, whether on the cliffs looking at the beach, or a few minutes on foot to the sand.

There are 4 primary hotel areas in town:

• Area 1 – Spyglass and Shell Beach neighborhoods, nice views and coastal access to tide pools. 5 minutes by car to restaurants and town activities.
• Area 2 – Pismo Cliffs area, foot access to the main beach and downtown area, great views of the coast and beach.
• Area 3 – Downtown area, closest to the main beach and pier, and commercial and restaurant center. Quite busy/active.
• Area 4 – No beach access or views, freeway adjacent.

North of town in Area 1 you will find yourself using your car to get to the beach and shopping and restaurants. The Cliffs and Dolphin Bay Resort have nice views and aim for a more upscale vibe with on-premise restaurants and coastal access to tide-pools and lovely vistas. The Paloma Inn and Shell Beach Inn are in the commercial area of Shell Beach which has some nice restaurants.

Much closer to town and accessible by a lovely foot-path and stairs to the north-end of the beach is what I’ve termed “Pismo Cliffs” Area 2. These hotels have stunning views and are bigger / lots of rooms, so less resort vibe, more “I’m in vegas-by-the-sea” in a small town. Inn at the Cove is a little apart and feels more secluded as a result, with great views.

Area 3 is the center of town, where most of the restaurants and commercial stores are based. This is an altogether more bustling couple of square blocks and gets busy with day-trippers during the sunny summer days (eg: crowded traffic). These hotels range from older motel/inns, to the prominent beachfront resorts along the main facade of the pier: Inn at the Pier, Vespera, Sandcastle, and SeaVenture.

Area 4 hotels are freeway adjacent and ideal for out-0f-town stays for visiting family or business in the area. They are only 5 minutes by car to the beach, but are not pedestrian friendly as the Amtrak railroad tracks bifurcate access by foot. Car only, which is a shame.

Our Hotel Recommendations to Friends and Family Visiting Pismo Beach

Our top pick is actually not even in town, the Inn at Avila Beach. Avila Beach is a small village with its own beach and cute pedestrian promenade just a tad north of town (10 minutes by car). We recommend the Inn’s 8 suites that are right on the street above the lobby with great ocean views and private balconies for sunsets. If those suites aren’t available, then default back to Pismo for ocean view rooms. As a bonus they have a happy hour with free pie every evening! Nearby 30 yards away is excellent Kraken Coffee

Vespera is a recently updated property and one of the bigger main hotels right in town, 1 block to shopping (think San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf–tourist shops selling t-shirts, fast food, sweets, etc. — funky but charming in an old-timey family-friendly way). The large, lovely beach is right there, stretching for miles in both directions and very swim and surf friendly (the ocean is cold though). Many of our friends love being right at the beach and have enjoyed this property, with its pool, restaurant amenities. It’s new construction too.

About 1 mile north of the center of town there are several options, such as Inn at the Cove, a bit jammed in between the 101 freeway and the coast, but has a really nice protected cove view and a path down to the water. It is walking distance to Dinosaur Park (5 minutes) and to the shops in Shell Beach (coffee, some restaurants) and worth a visit. Lots of restaurants , and coffee/breakfast at Steaming Bean is about 15 minute walk. Kon Tiki Inn is a 3-star hotel, includes free visits to the nearby athletic club and ocean front rooms with fire pits on the cliff over the sea (and beach access). The rooms look basic but nice. Sea Crest is another option. Similar to Kon Tiki–a little older and similar amenities.

For more of a “resort” vibe (eg: more rooms, more private property, a bigger restaurant and pool, a semi-private stair-access to a rocky tide-pool beach area) is The Cliffs.

For the classy boutique small hotel experience there are 2 good options in downtown San Luis Obispo (called “slo” by locals) which is 15 minutes by freeway to Pismo. The Hotel San Luis Obispo was opened in 2020 so on the newer side: about a block from the center walking/shopping district of town, spacious modern rooms, a restaurant and bar and pool on site.

Granada Hotel is smaller and cozier, tucked-in on a small side street, also just a block from the main pedestrian areas of SLO.

For a complete list of options and more information about visiting Pismo Beach, our town’s destination marketing website has a comprehensive overview of Pismo Beach Hotels.

Things to Do in Pismo Beach

Here’s a starting list of activities, which we will add to as we cover. more of our favorite activities in town.

• Take a hike in the incredible Montana de Oro State Park which is about 25 minutes drive north. The ocean-front trails are delightful and all sorts of flor and fauna can be spotted.
• Take a hike in the Pismo Preserve which has 4-7 mile loops that ascend to the rolling hills overlooking town and the coast, magnificent views.
• Take a walk to Pirates Cover on the north end of town.
• Dine at the best restaurant in Pismo Beach
• Walk from the Grover Beach parking lot along a lovely elevated boardwalk path, past the Monarch Butterfly Grove, and into Pismo Beach town. This 20 minute walk is one of our favorites (50 minutes round trio to the end of the Pier in Pismo, and back).

Voodle evolved to focus on 1-to-many “me-casting” workflows–such as a sales outreach, coaching group, or other special interest space for asymmetrical chat (eg: not everyone participating making videos, rather, most users watching the videos of a main/principal maker). Email notification workflows, analytics for views/engagement, and other more traditional sales/CRM features were added.

The last phase of exploration in summer and fall of 2022 included Web3 token-gated spaces for creators to build audiences around a mixture of NFT, video, text, graphic posts.

Here’s a quick demo from fall 2021, and some screenshots of key UX and features.

Pixvana was a VR Video tech startup from 2016-2019 that built a cloud virtual reality video processing, streaming, and editing software suite SPIN Studio. The company was based in Seattle WA and had traction with large media companies that used its platform to build consumer facing media streaming apps. As the 2015-2018 VR market cycle crashed (Microsoft and Google canceled their consumer headset plans, Meta/Oculus adoption faltered) and consumer VR adoption failed to breakthrough to meaningful usage, Pixvana built enterprise training tools. Ultimately the VR market proved “too-early” and development of Pixvana was shuttered in late 2019.

Pixvana SPIN Studio had comprehensive features to process raw VR video camera files and prepare them for very high quality streaming to headsets at 8k+ resolutions. The app was capable of massive parallel rendering with cloud GPU instances, so that a task that might require 10hrs to render on a single workstation class PC, could be distributed to 100+ nodes and rendered in just minutes.

Some of the core features are shown below, for posterity.

I’ve been a founder of several businesses and by my count worked on ~15 v1.0 software products at both startups and large co’s. Pixvana’s SPIN Studio platform far and away exceeded anything else I’ve ever been involved with in terms of system design, technical innovation, and the potential to be of large commercial consequence for decades.  Alas, the work also scores as the most catastrophically irrelevant (measured by adoption by end-users we achieved) of my career.

Voodle by comparison was a practical, pragmatic application that required very little technical innovation or real change in users’ expectations, but it did come on the scene at a time of “app saturation” when we were welcomed by a market with quite a bit of app-adoption-friction.  We executed well-enough, but failed to find product-market-fit.

Over the last 7 years our approach evolved and ultimately meandered as we shipped a series of interesting tools that scored as not-quite-right for customers.  We started with large media companies and followed with makers; pivoted to enterprise learning orgs, to individuals on teams, and ended up in last efforts with “one-to-many” affinity communities.  From VR, to mobile selfie video-messaging and of late to web3 and utility for NFTs in community.

All of us that worked on the projects are incredibly disappointed.  Hard work, good execution, dogged perseverance – these are table-stakes.  Timing and luck are also brutally critical ingredients.  We aspired to delight customers. We didn’t.  I’m chagrined that we pursued such a wide set of interesting technologies in search of problems to solve—a cardinal sin.

To our shareholders and advisors  Thank You  for your support of me and the team with your trust, mentorship, and capital.  To my colleagues, we did a lot of great work and I know we all take our experience together forward into new chapters to come in our lives.

—  Forest Key, Dec 2022

The last 7 years touched the lives of many team members who worked together. For many Pixvana + Voodle were a first job right out of college, and for a few it was their formal job before retirement. From an office in Seattle, we evolved into a remote team in 8 states in our pajamas. We collaborated with passion, and experienced disappointments and achievements.

However, we may be plenty happy just selling the lot and letting someone else have all the fun. I’ve put together a site description page for the vacant lot at 991 Visalia St. Pismo Beach CA 93449, and am inquiring with some realtors about listing. We don’t have to sell… but having it listed to see what comes along, probably makes a lot of sense given our other life priorities right now, and, the fact that we are happily installed just 50 meters over on the same street in our very cute and livable house.