Amongst other things... I am a founder, researcher, software engineer, musician, writer, and a hobby mathematician when I have the time.
After graduating in 2020, I worked part-time as a data engineer before becoming interested in crypto through NFTs. I was excited about NFTs as a way to give provenance to digital artists, and to experiment with new financialization models that could free these artists from the tyranny of traditional structures that often exploited them with abusive contracts. To that end, I joined an early-stage startup as the lead backend engineer building infrastructure to support and experiment with NFT curation and marketplaces.
Towards the middle of 2023, I found myself jaded to the crypto industry, and gave myself a "gap year" to explore other interests before making my next career move. The NFT sector had devolved (predictably) into a pure hyper-financialized speculation game, artists were rarely supported in the ways I had hoped, and no truly innovative business models had emerged to ground the hype. I left my job in June 2023 and began my mini-sabbatical.
I spent the rest of the year and the first half of 2024 mostly exploring creative and personal interests, including music, visual art, writing, and deepening my contemplative practice.
At the end of this hiatus, I decided to give crypto a second chance, but from a different angle that I hoped would help me develop a holistic yet technical perspective. I joined a leading crypto-focused venture capital firm as a technical infrastructure analyst, focusing on research and deal diligence for blockchain infrastructure projects.
As the crypto-AI relationship began to mature by the end of 2024, and with no one else on the team specifically focused on AI, I decided to add it to my responsibilities and began leading much of the AI research at 1kx. I found myself becoming increasingly enamored with AI, and correspondingly less interested in crypto, so I joined two colleagues who were similarly ready to leave the blockchain industry, and together we founded Concordance, where we explore the burgeoning niche of applied mechanistic interpretability.
Two talks when I was a fulltime crypto researcher.
You can find my music on all streaming platforms:
Past experiences and achievements.