Jelani John

01 / The beginning

Brooklyn

Nine feet tall, catching bullets with his teeth.

  • The truth is quieter: a kid in Brooklyn who wanted to know how things worked.
  • Drawing, games, and machines taken apart faster than they went back together.

02 / Undergrad

How people think. How machines do.

Computer science on one shoulder, psychology on the other.

  • Two degrees that turned out to be the same question asked twice.
  • Game design as the lab where both answers get tested.

03 / 2011 — 2016

First systems, real users

Software stops being homework the day someone depends on it.

  • Built a billing and financial-agreement platform for NYU ITS.
  • Learned that shipping across departments is a people problem wearing a technical costume.

04 / NYU Tisch · ITP

Art school for engineers

The engineering was never the point. The wonder was.

  • MPS from the ITP graduate program at Tisch School of the Arts.
  • Animation, storytelling, and the permission to make <s>useless</s> beautiful things.

05 / 2015 — 2019

The workshop years

Every client a new machine to open up.

  • Plugins and platforms across dozens of sites at FlyPilot Studios.
  • Blockchain provenance at BlockApps — one product tracked through four companies.

06 / 2019 — 2024

The rigor

Money moves when the system is boring on purpose.

  • Commercial credit at Capital One; appraisal infrastructure at Bowery.
  • Electronic trading at Bloomberg — audit trails, compliance, and early LLM adoption.

07 / Now

The duality

Bulletproof systems by day, procedural whimsy by night.

  • Fractional CTO at BLAPP
  • Gluefi — tokenized finance between web2 rails and on-chain settlement.
  • And the toys that keep it human: What’s Next, WAID, Whence, Who Am I.