About
I am a hands-on investor at my fund, ScOp VC, helping companies develop products and scale teams. I’m interested in vertical applications that leverage complex underlying data (i.e. government, finance, real estate). During the 2010s, my team developed nocode tools for “knowledge engineers”, a role we invented at Graphiq to organize our team around knowledge categories (sports, movies, geography). These interests have translated well into a world of LLMs, particularly in cases where the optimal solution involves hairy, domain-specific data.
Before that, I spent ten years at Graphiq (aka FindTheBest), a startup which we eventually sold to Amazon, where I remained for three years until 2020. At Graphiq we built one of the largest general knowledge graphs and developed natural language understanding and generation technology. Our system powered the majority of Alexa’s open domain question understanding and answering, across all knowledge categories and in all locales/languages. At Amazon I managed a team of 140, comprised of software developers, product managers, and knowledge engineers. My technical expertise is in structured data and conversational systems. I have also spent a lot of time thinking and experiment with management and organizational approaches to optimize product/software development and foster innovation. I’m particularly interested in companies that turn complex data into rich experiences/products.
My academic background is in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics, followed by a short stint as a PhD. student in Financial Mathematics. I decided to drop out of my doctorate when a professor presented a proof for a stochastic process which resulted in infinite probability and refused to provide an intuitive explanation- this led me to conclude I was more of an engineer than a mathematician after all. Now I can claim having graduate education or brag about being a dropout, depending on the suitability of the context. My favorite academic subject was Information Theory.