About Me

Hi, I’m Avery!

I love building things, and I have spent most of my life creating products from scratch and scaling them with obsessive care. I am currently working on Custral, but I am a YC Alumni who previously built and ran Dripos. I'm an avid reader, and I'm using this corner of the internet to share what I am learning as I keep building, exploring, and trying to make something meaningful.

Career

I started my career young, learning to program at 11 (2010) by building websites and Minecraft plugins. I started building and running my own Minecaft server (2011), which eventually led to my first full-time job working on Minecraft's biggest server at the age of 14 (2013). After spending a year working from 2:30 PM to 1 AM each day, I shifted my focus to learning as much as I could about programming by building bots and websites for big Twitch streamers, making some video games, and trying my hand at multiple startup ideas.

Me and my friends Steven Wood and Jacob Kline at a hackathon in 2015

After graduating high school in 2017, I went straight into big tech at Deltek. I soon co-founded Cork Drinks (2018), a nightlife subscription service for bars, which later evolved into Drip (2019), a mobile ordering app for coffee shops. That eventually became Dripos (2020), an all-in-one platform for coffee shops that went through Y Combinator in Summer of 2020, and where I spent over half a decade building the product and team from the ground up.

My time building Dripos helped me see a much larger problem across the entire customer journey, which sparked the idea for Custral (2025): A system that unifies the entire customer journey, connecting sales, onboarding, support, success, and product into one continuous workflow.

Stella and I building the early versions of Custral

Outside of Work

Over the last decade and a half, my life has been fully consumed by work. I coded at least 8 hours a day during my adolescences, and as an adult I have worked at least 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. Over the last few months I've been striving to get a healthier work-life balance to prevent future burnout. Here are the things I've been interested in and actively doing!

Endurance sports: I love cycling and regularly go for 50-mile rides on weekends (I am a trail rider, not a street biker). I’m also a big Formula 1 fan, Max Verstappen and Ferrari in particular. I have a custom simulator rig in my apartment that I use to race daily.

Fitness is also important to me in order to maintain the best possible mindset. As Seneca wrote,“We should treat the body rigorously, that it may not be disobedient to the mind.”

My racing setup (left), On the track at the Austin Grand Prix (middle), A snapshot of a 50 mile bike around Nantucket (right)

Philosophy: Stoicism plays a central role in how I approach life and leadership. I read Stoic texts every morning and keep a daily journal; I often describe Stoicism as my philosophy of life and religion.

People will often make fun of me for talking about it so much, but it has always been the framework I rely on to navigate personal and businesses challenges with clarity and perspective.

I highlight and sticky note all my philosophy and business books very rigorously. And yes the color of the sticky note mean something.

Reading: I didn’t go to college and never had early mentors, so books became my teachers and the Barnes & Noble in Union Square became my campus. Nearly everything I know about business and leadership comes from relentless self-education. As a person, most of my personality has been shaped by the people who shared their lives and experiences through writing.

I revisit yearly the classics like Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie. I’ve been shaped by works such as Bob Iger’s The Ride of a Lifetime, Peter Thiel’s Zero to One, Barack Obama’s A Promised Land, Michelle Obama’s Becoming, and a recent biography of Theodore Roosevelt.

As you might see below, I don't own or read many fiction books.

Early stages of my bookshelves. Both of them are now filled, and I am having to buy another shelf!

Curiosity: Curiosity is a defining trait for me. I constantly explore new ideas, technologies, and philosophies, following threads wherever they lead. It’s what drives me to keep learning and building, and it’s the same trait that fuels my approach to startups.

Lenny has been expanding my horizons for years now

As an engineer at heart, The Pragmatic Engineer is a very interesting read

Book Recommendations

I have so many to choose from, but here are a few that have a special place in my heart.