About

I'm Ari. I lead design teams and ship products.

Right now I'm Head of Design at Join, a venture-backed construction platform used by 1,000+ companies including DPR and STO Building Group. Before that I was the founding designer at Blockdaemon (crypto infrastructure valued at $3.25B, backed by Goldman Sachs and SoftBank), design lead at Gradle (developer tools for Netflix and Salesforce), and design lead at Jet.com through Walmart's $3.3B acquisition. Most of my career has been zero-to-one: taking something undefined and giving it shape.

At Blockdaemon I grew the design org from one person (me) to seven. At Join I inherited a junior team and now they run research and ship AI prototypes on their own. The throughline is the same: I stay close to the work, I build things alongside the people I lead, and I'd rather ship something real than present a deck about shipping something real.

I own six record players. My wife is very patient about this. I also over-automate everything, and we spend our downtime chasing our two girls across Toronto.