Ben Harvey?

On the record.

He signed with South Carolina out of Maryland and wore 35 for the Gamecocks in the SEC. Then he transferred to Towson, played defensive back, and walked out with a computer science degree — a Division-I athlete and an engineer in the same career.

Football didn’t teach him how to win. It taught him how to show up on the days he didn’t feel like it — which turns out to be the only skill that transfers to everything else on this page.

He answered, and never looked back.

Code2040 — the selective nonprofit that places top engineering talent with Silicon Valley companies — brought him west on the strength of his engineering. He landed in a culture where people were funded for ideas, for one reason: they could build them.

That’s Ben Horowitz next to him — co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, the firm behind Facebook, Airbnb, Coinbase and GitHub. Ben met him through Code2040, in his twenties, already building.

Where he learned what production actually means.

Three and a half years as a Staff Android Engineer at Meta, on a platform serving more than two billion people. He led the Kotlin and Jetpack Compose migration across it — fifteen million lines — and built the crash-detection system that cut time-to-detection from six hours to fifteen minutes.

He was the technical lead on Trial Reels, the feature that drove 180 million new user acquisitions in a single quarter, across a twenty-five-engineer team.

Scale taught him the part most AI demos skip: the system has to hold up for millions of people who never read the docs.