Meet the Team!

Dale Brewer

Creative experience leader, product designer, creative director, manager and mentor, Dale Brewer has been the original design lead on some of the most influential and respected projects in recent memory—the apple.com redesign, iOS 1, Palm Web OS and many, many more. Whether it’s providing creative, innovative solutions in mobile, web and desktop applications, helping refine and improve cyber security, or using his skills to manage, mentor and encourage designers to push the envelope, Dale is actively immersed in the designs on every product he’s responsible for.

Dale also has a rich agency background, having worked both staff and freelance at a long list of agencies including TBWA\Chiat\Day and The Designory in Senior Interactive Art Director roles on innovative brands like Master Foods, Boost Mobile, Infiniti, Nissan, Scion, Nokia and Coke Cola.

Enhancing user experience is the name of the game, and it is Dale’s passion for design that helps make the finished product—user interface, visual, interaction and prototype design—as intuitive, enjoyable and effortless as possible for the end user.

When he’s not coming up with cutting-edge designs, interfaces and innovative enhancements to user experience, you can find Dale drawing, painting, snowboarding and spending quality time with his beautiful wife, dog and two amazing children.

Juan David Nicholls

J.D Nicholls is an Open Source Contributor, Full Stack Developer with a background in web, mobile and game development. He has 10+ years of practice and leadership building interactive experiences.

During this time he has used technology to solve all kinds of problems, working on projects for social networks like Facebook and Enterprise apps, designing Single Page Apps, PWA and Hybrid Mobile apps (iOS, Android, Web), using Mobile and Offline first approaches to improve the UX and providing solutions to be used around the world from many types of devices.

At the same time J.D has created resources for other developers to improve the DX, through Open Source contributions, creating social projects on GitHub and achieving millions of downloads from platforms such as NPM, while collaborating with teams and people from all over the world.

In his free time he also participates in tech communities (Avanet, MedellinJS, CodeYourFuture, ColombiaDev). J.D has also spoken at international events such as Microsoft DevDays and JSConf where he has learned and shared information about new technologies with other talented professionals, participated in mentoring programs and has been a mentor for other developers who also seek to continue learning and sharing knowledge.

J.D is focused on Web, Mobile, Gaming and Cloud Technologies.

To be, or not to be, that’s not the dilemma… Let it be 🌱 – J.D. Nicholls

Cecil Odom

Cecil Odom is a product development professional, UX design program manager, growth marketing lead, and mentor. A former student at Texas Tech University, he studied Chemical Engineering but instead became an experienced product development leader. He has extensive professional experience, having previously worked at Brave as the head of product for the advertisement platform, as a senior manager in design operations at Splunk, a senior program manager at Facebook in the design tools department, and a senior design program manager at Airbnb. Cecil has also worked as a senior program manager at Google Analytics, a senior program manager of UX and hardware at Lytro, a Senior UX & mobile program manager at Samsung R&D and a UX program manager at Apple’s iTunes design team focusing on AppleTV, podcasts, and stores. He has also held positions at Motorola, Participant Media, Helio, Ogilvy & Mather, and Deutsch LA.

Enjoying opportunities to learn new things as often as possible is Cecil’s philosophy for life. He is also interested in macroeconomics, blockchain, fine art, traditional investing, farming, music, and whiskey. Education and personal growth are now prominent as learning daily about life’s joys from his young family has become a lifelong achievement.

Jason You

Je Seung You (Jason) was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea. He is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Computer Science at Columbia University, under Professor Lydia Chilton, to work on his thesis project about developing an inclusive STEM education platform for low-income and underrepresented K-12 students. This Spring semester, he is serving as a TA of Intro to Databases course under Professor Donald Ferguson, where he met Carrie, Sophie, and other amazing TAs! Technologically, he has experience in HTML/CSS/JavaScript, Python, Java, C, and C# (Unity) languages.

Before he came to the US, he founded and worked for his startup, providing an alternative education platform for students with learning disabilities or from nontraditional backgrounds for few years after highschool. Then, he served two years as a military police for the Second Infantry Division of the United States Army as the part of Korean Augmentation of the United States Army Program (KATUSA). He came to the US in 2016 after finishing his military service to start his undergraduate college education at Columbia.

In his free time, Jason trains in Taekwondo as the part of Columbia Taekwondo Team, to compete at the collegiate and national tournaments representing Columbia. On top of that, he enjoys playing Tennis, watching movies/musical shows, and traveling.

Jeff Bogursky

Jeff is currently consulting with BAXUS on the creation of its proprietary NFT stack.

A serial entrepreneur and digital pioneer, Jeff has been pushing boundaries since the 1980’s. Getting his start in the pharmaceutical industry, he has worked with top 10 global companies at his award winning agency, Cell Division. There, Jeff developed over 20 years of digital programs and experiences using a broad range of technologies from the earliest days of the internet to interactive holography, as well as an early and profitable VR multiplayer multi-location gaming platform called REALWare®. Having sold his agency to global advertising conglomerate Havas, Jeff has moved from pharmaceuticals to the liquor world, enjoying its growing nexus with tech.

Saber Sharifi

Saber experienced coding with BASIC on VTech Power Pad and pursued his passion studying CS. After graduating from New Mexico State University, he has put his skills to work in various industries such as cash advance, real estate and luxury shared economy. With the rise of web3 technologies he joined Brave Browser as engineer leading the development of privacy first advertising platform. He adopted various cryptographic techniques and battled with fraud. Now at BAXUS he is pushing to increase adoption of verifiable ledgers to spirit owners and producers.

Sergei Patrikeev

Sergei is a passionate software developer with over 7 years of experience building backend infrastructures and blockchain integrations. While in secondary school, he won several olympiads in informatics, and fell in love with algorithms, data structures and solving interesting challenges. Sergei received his masters degree in computer science from ITMO University in Saint-Petersburg, Russia and is famous as a multi-year champion of the Association for Computer Programming – International Collegiate Programming Competition. His master’s thesis was related to static analysis of binary compatibility of Java virtual machine libraries. Sergei worked as a core software engineer at JetBrains building IntelliJ IDEA, where he grew from an intern to a senior developer. For the last 2 years Sergei has been building projects based on blockchains, most notably Rarible.com where he integrated Solana NFTs to the markeplace. Currently, he’s enthusiastic about Web3 space and willing to contribute to the Solana ecosystem. At BAXUS, Sergei is developing protocols and smart-contracts to manage user’s portfolios.

Shyam Pandya

Shyam was born in Ahmedabad, India, and spent most of his school life in Dubai, UAE. He is a hard-working and multi-versed software engineer who got his bachelors in Computer Science from PEC University of Technology, Chandigarh, India, and is currently a graduate student at Columbia University majoring in Computer Science under the Machine Learning Track. He believes in doing his bit to contribute to the welfare of society by designing innovative solutions and leveraging the power of Artificial Intelligence. He has worked on multiple deep learning projects in medical imaging and object detection/classification during his undergraduate degree. He is currently part of the Digital Video and Multimedia lab under Prof. Shih-Fu Chang at Columbia University working on a Weakly supervised approach to solving the Grounded Video Event Extraction problem. He spent 1.5 years as a full-stack developer at Cvent, India, and recently interned at Microsoft, Redmond to improve the Windows OS tonemapper.  With his diverse experience in the software development industry and passion for machine learning, he will help build computer vision techniques to determine asset authenticity as well as price prediction algorithms at Baxus.