Brad Birdsall, a product designer at Medium, willingly presents himself in a nutshell. “There are three things you need to know about me,” he says, counting them off: “I’m super-close with my family, I like to work hard and do things well, and I try my hardest to surround myself with good people. Those are the only things I really care about in life.”

I would argue there are a few more things you need to know about Birdsall. He punctuates most messages with emoticons. He occasionally insists that you call him “Black Fire,” more commonly rendered #blackfire. “That’s how you should refer to me in the piece,” he reminds me. He is, by his own estimation, “a big ham” and “stupidly competitive.” Upon learning that, like him, I ran high school track, he demands, “What was your best mile time?”

Birdsall grew up in “the great state of Michigan,” in a small town called Northville, not far from Ann Arbor. He notes, “When my family gets together, it’s a large number of loud Italians, and I’m still one of the loudest. That’s why I can be very forceful in a room. I communicate with people based on how my family communicates with each other.”

Of his formal education, Birdsall observes, “I went to college…ish.” He attended Kettering University, enrolling as a mechanical engineering student in the school’s co-op program, where participants alternate between three months of school and three months of full-time work. “ I’m someone who just likes to build things. When I was growing up, we had a garage where me and my dad and my brother would work on cars and motorcycles and other projects. I always had my hands dirty.”

Web development happened almost accidentally. Birdsall laughs, “My mom remembers me bragging to her years ago that I can learn anything on the Internet. Everything I know about my job today I learned from Google.” Halfway through his five-year undergraduate program, Birdsall and a friend started a company, working on a small electronic component:

My first experience in web development was building the website for this company. Then we built a site for a school-sponsored Green Week featuring companies involved in green technology. Then a lot of the other small businesses at school wanted us to build sites for them. And they said they would pay us. We started a web shop. I was 24/7 looking up how to do everything. It was so much fun that I stopped really caring about mechanical engineering. I wanted to build websites, so I switched to computer science, thinking maybe they could teach me something I wasn’t Googling.

Birdsall dropped out of college a couple of semesters after switching to CS. His web shop, Prime, had a new office in Northville, and the two partners were landing work with major clients, including Best Buy, Lennox, and Whirlpool. “I was like YOLO, I’m making enough to move to California. So I left school. I was six months away from graduating. My parents were not big fans, but I felt that this time was precious.”

In San Francisco, Birdsall started a company with two others called Syllabuster. A few months in, the team was looking for an iOS developer and brought Grant Oladipo on as a co-founder. “Meeting Grant was one of the defining moments of my life,” he says. After Syllabuster broke up, Birdsall and Oladipo began working on Together, “which was meant to fix the problem of how groups of people meet up.” Together the startup didn’t stick, but together its founders ended up at Medium.

Birdsall is undeniably gregarious and charismatic—he has a knack for finding very funny ways of getting at very serious things—but there’s another, quieter side to him. “I think it’s good to choose the people you’re open and vulnerable with,” he reflects. “I’d rather have a handful of really close friends than a lot of people I’m kind of close to.” He maintains the integrity of his core philosophies:

“Even in the periods of my life like the last year, when I had no money—no money was an exaggeration of how much money I had—the only thing that was still important was people.”

People were a major draw at Medium, where Birdsall quickly took on much of the work around image processing in profiles and posts. He was involved in the product design for the newly launched Medium 1.0, a set of features that changed the style and innovated upon the structure of the site.

“I enjoy the hybrid of design and engineering,” he says, “and I just want to build things with my hands. I really like the vision at Medium that the way knowledge is shared can be better, but one of the main reasons I’m here is that I want to be around these people all the time. Not only are they people I would choose to be around anyway, but they’re operating at an insane skill level that I just feel like I’m aspiring to.”

Birdsall grins, “And now I’m here, making images zoom, building storytelling features, and trying to piss Ev off as much as possible.”