An anthropologist in payments.

Visa is the latest stop on a path that ran through Facebook, Robinhood, and Circle, after a PhD in social anthropology at Harvard. The timeline below has the details.

I do product research the way I was trained to do anthropology. My dissertation followed musicians in Pakistan as digital technology rewired how music got made, shared, and paid for. That work left me with the question I still ask of every wallet, transfer, and receipt: what does this mean to the person holding it? The questions I find most interesting are about obligation, memory, identity, and care, and interfaces are one of the places they show up. My best research happens in the unscripted moments: a tangent mid-interview, a screen share that runs long, the thing someone mentions after we've already said goodbye.

Practically, that means working at two speeds. I still take the ad hoc questions most research teams are built around, the familiar loop of ask, wait, report. Alongside that, I build systems for continuous discovery, so when a decision needs evidence, some of it is already there.