About
I am a hands-on investor, helping companies develop ML products and scale teams. Professionally, I spent ten years at Graphiq, 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 now powers the majority of Alexa’s open domain question understanding and answering, across all knowledge categories and in all locales/languages in which the product is available. At Amazon I managed a team of 130, comprised of software developers, product managers, and knowledge engineers. My technical expertise is in structured data and conversational systems. In 2022-2023, I was CEO of one of ScOp's portfolio companies, HeyTutor; where we deliver tutoring services to public school children across the country. I have also spent a lot of time thinking and experiment with management and organizational approaches to optimize pr…
Experience
General Partner / Technical Director
ScOp Venture Capital · Santa Barbara, California, United States
Present
Among my partners, I focus primarily on tech/AI companies, and general operating support for our founders.
Co-Founder & Researcher
Present
We are working in reward hacking detection and mitigation. We have a concrete research agenda to study reward hacking tasks to complete our empirical study measuring how reward visibility affects hacking behavior, demonstrate whether RL training systematically amplifies reward hacking, and establish actionable guidelines for test design.
Research Collaborator
Present
I'm a core open source contributor to Terminal Bench, a collaboration between Stanford and Laude Institute. I focus on defining task expectations (e.g. level of difficulty) for the benchmarks, and engaging with contributors to support with the design and reviews of tasks.
Board Member
Present
First investor. AI Agents for every chip design and verification engineer.
Co-Founder (2021), Investor (2022+)
Present
I was the a co-founder of Unwrap, a startup we incubated at the Allen Institute for AI. We focused on making sense of customer feedback at scale. I was involved in building the first prototype and raising early capital, but ultimately decided to pursue investing full time. Unwrap is one of our investments at ScOp VC.
Ceo
I stepped in full time to help HeyTutor's transition from startup to growth business. We adopted stricter procedures and executed meaningful organizational changes. In a year, we grew the business by 5x.
Education
University of Massachusetts Amherst
BS, Electrical Engineering & Financial Math (double degree)
UC Santa Barbara
PhD, Statistics and Applied Probability with emphasis in Financial Mathematics
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