(originally posted on Medium)

Note: This post originally aired in February 2014 on Tumblr but was moved to Medium in October 2014.

Over the past few months I’ve gotten to slow down a bit, spend some more time with my kids and enjoy a lot of coffees with a wide variety of people here in the city. The range of interesting new people I got to meet and projects I got to learn about was inspiring, particularly as lifelong New Yorker who cares deeply about continuing to grow the consumer product presence and community here in New York City.

While I really enjoyed taking a bit of a break, I knew that soon enough I’d find something that got me super excited and I’d be itching to dive back into making things and building a team again.

About 2 months ago, I was lucky enough to be introduced to an incredibly talented, experienced, team working on solving big problems that sit at the nexus of a few of my personal passions — mobile technology, health and the power of insights derived from data.

Over the years, the product work I’ve done has always mirrored needs that I’ve personally had. In 2002, I was 26 and spent a lot of time going out so building software that helped me know where my friends were hanging out made sense — hence, dodgeball. In 2009, I was 33 and about to have my first child. I was no longer going out 5 nights a week but I had started to care more about the quality of experiences I had when I did go out for a meal or a drink — hence, foursquare. Today, I’m 37 with a 4 year old and an 8 month old and something I carry with me every single day is: how can I be around and healthy as long as possible to see as much as possible of the lives my children create for themselves — hence, Project Florida.

Over the past 5 years, I’ve owned every major wearable on the market, through multiple generations for each. I’ve used smart scales and smart apps. I’m intimately familiar with where all of these succeed and where they fall short. Before we had wearables to record our actions, I built an Excel doc to help me manually track my weight, diet and fitness. That document helped me understand what my habits were and how different variations produced different results over time. It also helped me go from 252lbs down to 209lbs before my wedding (details here). That understanding and change in my core habits also had a material impact on the critical numbers reflected in my blood work (quantitative results here).

I believe deeply in the power of really understanding your health, developing and reinforcing habits that help you become the better version of yourself. The combination of the technology many of us are lucky enough to carry around with us and our ability to turn heaps of data into accessible, personalized, and empowering insights is finally at a place where we can push the space forward past data for data’s sake to a place of profound impact and I’m really excited to get to work with this team to make that happen.

As of 3 weeks ago, I joined the Project Florida team as Head of Design. We’re a small team with a big mission to help people better understand their habits and live healthier lives. In order to tackle our mission, we’ve built an incredible team and are actively growing it (Hello Drew Conway!)

I’m personally looking to meet Senior Product Designers who share our passion and want to build something great here in NYC. If you’re interested in joining our Design team, drop me an email at alex@projectfla.com or if you want to learn more about all of the roles we’re hiring for, email weare@projectfla.com.

Giddy up!