Theo just wants to understand how things work. This has led him around the world, from a plastic injection mold manufacturer in Shenzhen to a grain trader in North Dakota. “I am fundamentally curious about the world,” he says. “Underneath almost every good or service is a massively interesting web of complexity.”

Theo took his first programming job building a fintech platform at age 14. After high school, he left his hometown in Massachusetts and headed west to San Francisco where he got a sink-or-swim education as an engineer at several startups.

Before joining Spark, Theo spent three years at Notion. He arrived as one of the first engineers on the AI team, and left having worked on everything from product engineering to procurement to a stint on the sales team. “I enjoyed being the translator between folks that wanted to work together but didn’t have the shared vocabulary,” he says.

As a self-described systems-obsessive, he enjoys working with founders who want to keep pulling the thread. “What is your theory of change?” he asks. “Many nominally complex systems are the way they are because no one has bothered to question them.”