Hey, I’m Ron 
. I’m a 39-year-old product manager 💻 on a path of personal growth 🤯, developing my mind and body to navigate life 🏃♂️, and having fun along the way 😈.
Quick facts about me
✔️ I’ve been a product manager for 18 years in games and entertainment roles across the tech industry, currently working on Meta Quest.
✔️ I studied computer science at Virginia Tech, graduating in 2007.
✔️ I was born in Richmond, Virginia and now live in Seattle.
Most “About” pages offer a concise summary of the subject’s background that can be copy-pasted and read when introducing them before an interview or something.
But I believe life is about experiences with the people I love. I believe our lives are the product of many small choices that have massive impact on our journeys.
So, this isn’t one of those typical About pages.
Instead, sit back, and enjoy…
My Journey (The Long Version)
(There’s a TLDR at the end in case you’re in a rush.)
”Let me tell you what I wish I’d known, when I was young and dreamed of glory. You have no control who lives, who dies, who tells your story.” -General Washington, Hamilton
The Early Years
I grew up in Richmond, Virginia loving video games, as 90s kids do. Mario Bros, Zelda, and especially role-playing games like Final Fantasy. I loved the stories, the gameplay, the music, the art, and everything about how they were made. I went deep.
But it was also really important to my parents that we were avid readers, so we spent a lot of time at the library as kids, which for me was the sci-fi & fantasy section. And it was there around 4th grade that I discovered this book on how to create my own computer games.
I took it home, followed the instructions, and when I created this silly number guessing game to run on our computer, you’d think I created black magic. I strode triumphantly into my parents’ room to boldly declare, “I shall be a game developer!”, which they met with looks of confusion and laughter because that wasn’t a very popular career path at the time.
But I was hooked on this new hobby and started searching out every book in the Chesterfield County library system about game development that I could get my hands on: Teach Yourself Game Programming in 21 Days, Black Art of 3D Game Programming (which was way too advanced for me at the time), Tricks of the Windows Game Programming Gurus (more my speed).
I also fell in love with the music of games (because again, Final Fantasy), and even though I wanted to take woodworking in middle school like all the cool kids, I begrudgingly acquiesced to my parents requiring me to learn piano and join the band. I told myself, at least I could learn to play the music from my favorite games 🎶
And so throughout middle and high school, I was nurturing this (mostly secret) love of game programming, crying at night about the emotional impact of Final Fantasy VII (don’t judge), and getting into heated arguments on the internet about how games should be considered art (can you believe this was even a debate?!). And then more publicly, I was getting deeper into music, joining then leading the marching band, playing in the jazz band, and leading the step team. These were my first experiences leading groups of people, which turned out to be more formative than I could realize at the time (foreshadowing).
This double-life followed me into college at Virginia Tech where I studied computer science, but you wouldn’t know it because I was spending 90% of my time participating in (and sometimes starting) different clubs and organizations around campus. Student government. A breakdancing team. Orientation leadership. I stumbled my way into an amazing undergraduate research program where I could put my game development hobby to use, working on human-computer interaction and data visualization projects. But my proudest achievements were organizing friends to win talent shows that I was skipping exams to rehearse for. I was all over the place.
Two life-changing things happened during my senior year that altered my outlook and future direction.
The first is that during the spring of my senior year, I handed my resume to a recruiter from Microsoft at a career fair and told them about my plans to become a game developer.
“That’s great!” they said. “You like games. We make games. Come make games!”
So I excitedly prepared for an on-site interview in Redmond, Washington, and as I was flying out, I sent the recruiter an email to learn more about the team I’d be interviewing with. Would it be the Xbox team? Maybe the Halo team? Perhaps an unannounced title?
Their reply: “Internet Explorer.”
Not what I’d hoped to hear. But I soon found myself interviewing for a QA role working on the industry-dominating (but aging) web browser of the time. And I loved meeting everyone there, including one of the leaders of the organization who’d previously worked on DirectX, the graphics system used to build games. So I was excited to accept the offer and coast through the rest of the semester.
The second thing that happened was waking up on the Virginia Tech campus on the morning of April 16, 2007, a day that would start like any other Monday and would soon become the day of the most horrific school shooting of its time. We lost 32 amazing souls that day, including a friend of mine. Nothing really prepares you for such devastating heartbreak, and I don’t know if you ever really fully heal from it. All these years later, gun violence still triggers me.
The lessons I choose to take away from the tragedy at Virginia Tech are:
- Love hard. You never know which moment of connection could be your last.
- Lean wholeheartedly into building the life you want to live while you still can.
- Be the light in what can often feel like a dark universe.
With the lessons learned from my college experience, I packed my bags and began my new life out west.
Adulting (A Millennial Term)
I’ve spent two chapters of adulthood in Seattle. The theme of the first chapter (which lasted about six years) was learning how to be an adult. I was starting all over and for the first time in my life, living on my own. I was figuring out what job benefits mean, learning to cook (and admittedly eating an embarrassing amount of Subway), making new friends, and just generally figuring out how to be a grownup (I’m still trying to figure this out).
A few noteworthy things happened in my first six years in Seattle.
My job as a QA engineer on the Internet Explorer team went pretty well. I remember walking out of the office on my first day after watching a room full of grown men (and staggeringly few women) arguing heatedly about something related to the web browser’s user interface, thinking, “What have I gotten myself into?”.
But things gradually started to click into place. It came with a lot of awkwardness of adjusting to corporate culture. Like the time our VP walked into my office to introduce himself and me (not knowing who he was) asking, “So, are you an intern?”, which led to incredulous looks from onlookers who heard the exchange (in my defense, he looked very young for his age).
I took all the training, learned all the TLAs (three-letter acronyms), got some projects under my belt, and even won an award with my team for our work on the browser’s privacy mode, the first of its time (control + shift + ‘p’ for … privacy…right?), earning us dinner at an absurdly expensive restaurant.
But something felt off about my role. I was learning a lot and enjoyed growing this methodical ability to discover all the ways I could break the software. But my aspirations were to be a creator, not a destroyer, of our work. I wanted to be inspiring and motivating the team with what problems our software could solve for people (like choreographing a talent show performance back in college), not just responsible for making sure it worked. Also, I was a good programmer, but I knew wasn’t going to knock it out of the park. But I loved bringing people together, commanding an audience’s attention, and thinking about the bigger picture. And finally, I’d moved here to work on games, and that was still what I wanted to do.
So I began taking steps to transition to a program management role and eventually found an open position on the Xbox team. That sentence makes it sound really simple and straightforward, but it was a long, drawn out, often hopeless-feeling process. Throughout my search, I’d also continued investing in my passion, participating in a game development club at the company. I also teamed up with some of my Internet Explorer teammates who were developing an indie game for Xbox at the time, and I composed the music.
So by the time I got to the interview, I was feeling really good about myself. Rather than trying to sell my skills, it felt more like an honest conversation about who I am, where I’m going, where Xbox was going, and how our paths might align. A LOT of the interview was about leadership style, with a lot of behavioral “tell me about a time when…” questions. And a lot of my responses started with, “I’ve never done that professionally, but let me tell you about a time when I needed to organize the marching band.”
I’m incredibly thankful for the product leaders who took a chance on this QA engineer brimming with enthusiasm, and almost two years after joining the Internet Explorer team, I became the newest program manager on a secret effort called Project Natal, which would later be revealed to be Kinect.
This turned out to be an incredible introduction to product management, which I’ll write more about sometime. But I mentioned some other things happened around this time too.
My brother-in-law is a financial asset manager who helped me get things like a 401(k) retirement plan set up early on. I’d read Rich Dad, Poor Dad and the Richest Man in Babylon when I was young, but the ideas were pretty abstract at the time. But now for the first time, I could actually start to think in practical terms about my personal finances.
I’m not sure how I stumbled onto it, but as internet rabbit holes go, I somehow found myself reading the blog of Mr Money Mustache, which introduced me to the idea of FIRE (financial independence; retire early). I’d also found myself picking up and quickly digesting Tim Ferris’s Four Hour Work Week. All these ideas made a lot of practical sense to me, and although I wasn’t as interested in their outcome (I didn’t want to retire. I liked my job!), taking control of my time and money became a source of purpose for me.
The last two things that happened later during this chapter turned out to complement each other.
First, I met one of my best friends on a New Year’s Eve trip in Las Vegas. Andrew and I tell people this a lot to see their reactions, but it’s really a lot more innocent than it sounds. One of my friends in Seattle invited me along for an annual trip with his high school friends. Suraj had the same conversation with Andrew and I separately:
“You’re gonna love [Andrew / Ron] because you both love Virginia Tech (Andrew’s dad taught at Virginia Tech), you both love to dance, and you both love ignorant rap music.”
To which we both answered (separately), “When do I meet him?” And as soon as we saw each other at the hotel, me wearing a VT visor, him wearing VT basketball shorts, an epic friendship was born. Although we lived relatively far away (Andrew living in San Diego at the time), we became close quickly, finding commonality in navigating life, career, dating, and figuring out life in our 20s.
Meanwhile, I was also developing a deep passion (addiction?) for a game called League of Legends. What started as a casual way to hang out with friends at night became something I was thinking more and more about throughout the day. I had a friend who’d moved to LA to work at the game’s publisher, Riot Games, and he was back in town helping out at a League of Legends tournament we were holding on the Microsoft campus. I went to the event, met some of the team, and they invited me down to LA to see the upcoming League of Legends World Championship at Staples Center (”Worlds” as it was known in the community).
It was incredible. Staples was packed with tens of thousands of fans watching the two best teams in the world competing for the Summoners Cup. The electronic music group The Crystal Method performed before the show. I’d never seen anything like it.
I went home that night thinking, “I need to work there.” That would be a big change, leaving a job where I’d just been promoted to a senior role, leaving my friends, giving up a lot of the day-to-day routine I’d built up living in Seattle, and essentially starting over.
But a few months of interviews later, Andrew (who had just moved to LA) picked me up from LAX for the annual New Year’s Eve trip (only true friends do pickups from LAX). I got in the car, slapped a Virginia Tech visor on his head and said, “I’m moving to LA.”
To be continued…
On the first Monday morning of February 2014, I arrived at the Riot Games office in Santa Monica for its legendary orientation week (“Denewbification”). Within hours, I felt like I’d found my tribe among people who shared a deep love for games (especially League of Legends). I was hired to work on a mobile app that was in development, but a few months later, I was transitioned to the Esports team to support their growing live events.
What I’m Up To Lately (The TLDR)
🥽 I’m a product manager working on Quest, a mixed reality device built by Meta. Before this, I worked across a few roles in the games industry. Early on, I worked on the Xbox team building Kinect, the motion sensing device for the console. Later, I worked at Riot Games leading their esports events initiative. I then founded a gaming startup for a year before joining the Oculus VR team at Facebook (now Meta).
🏘 I host an Airbnb property called the Eastlake, located in Seattle. It’s been an amazing lesson in designing five-star experiences for guests and systemizing a semi-automated business. It’s also a rad place to stay in downtown Seattle. Check it out on Airbnb if you’re planning a trip!
🧠 On this website, I’m building a second brain in public, capturing my thoughts on technology, building products, leading teams, growing businesses, and lessons I’ve learned about living a healthier, happier, more productive life. I also share my favorite tech and apps.
Timeline
Patents