Hi, my name is Bryan, and I am a product manager at GoFundMe.
Before moving to the Bay Area, I earned my social psychology Ph.D from NYU. During my short-lived career as an academic psychologist, I was interested in how people pursued their goals. Prior to that, I studied marine engineering while growing up in Singapore, but soon realized I didn’t want to spend months at sea (mostly because of the monsters).
While plotting my escape from academia, I realized that the three things that make me the happiest at work are mentoring and collaborating with great people, building things that others find meaningful, and learning something new every day. Armed with that knowledge, I explored potential roles in data science, science journalism, and UX research (you can see some old projects here). Eventually, enough people convinced me to try being a product manager, which is what I love doing now.
Besides my substantive knowledge about human behavior, my main skills are in research methods and statistics: Despite being a recovering psychologist, I still love figuring out why people do what they do, which, thankfully, is also a key part of product development. I also code in Python, which was my data analysis language of choice in graduate school.
In my free time, I run, play the guitar, read, and write. My goal in life is add to my list of projects that I think are really cool, but to which everyone else will ask: “That sounds like a terrible idea, why did you do that?”