My interests lie broadly in deep learning, security, and infrastructure.
Professionally, I’ve been involved primarily with two companies. I worked at Shape Security in Mountain View, CA, a valley security ‘darling’ in the 2010s. I had many jobs there but saw them through to effective security automation on an impressive list of the largest companies in the world. I’ve later worked at Prove Identity, within a small acquired startup engineering team in Redwood City, CA on a hybrid password-less authentication stack and in-house biometrics targeting regulated industry (pre-passkeys consolidation), and then building out their orchestration layer for customers who found the former too confusing. Much of my career is the art of bending clean primitives for large enterprise customers.
In between, I’ve been involved with various early stage startup endeavors with friends and ex-colleagues, as a founder, advisor, and consultant. The more I know the more I lean on narrative - no idea is inherently ‘technical’; Ross Anderson’s Security Engineering has been perhaps the most enduring textbook on my bookshelf. In that vein I have some overarching interests in regulatory policy and ‘emerging’ markets - demographics is destiny.
I’m an occasional contributor to open source software and frequent those watering holes: a conductor is firstly a musician. Major projects in deep learning and infrastructure (pytorch, etcd) are my primary interests.
I’m a theoretical physicist by training: first as an undergraduate at Stanford University, and later as a graduate student of the inventor of loop quantum gravity, at Pennsylvania State University. I thought I’d leave behind mathematics or it’d leave me once I left academia, but here we are with g^ab behind TLS and so(3) graph neural networks for physics AI.
I was born in Stanford, CA. As a kid I did Sprite shots on the tables of a now defunct narrow sushi bar on University Ave, long before stories of growing up in Palo Alto appeared in airport bookstores.