Who am I?

🖥 I’ve founded two venture-backed health tech companies, Curai and Koko.

I believe that despite the massive improvements the tech world has brought, it has carried over very little into the way the physical world around us operates. I’m obsessed with how to drive that change in healthcare and in other industries.

🧠 I was a Machine Learning researcher at Google and at Stanford.

My interest in AI and Machine Learning comes from two places: First, I believe it will be the most transformative technology humanity ever invents and second, I have had an interest, since being a kid, in making decision making a more quantitative and data-based process.

💵 I’ve also been through Y Combinator and was a partner at Dorm Room Fund and at Graduate Fund, two funds backed by First Round Capital.

I believe that the technology is the greatest lever we have to improve lives and drive progress and I study how financing models and other structures can create that positive change.

💭 I share my constant introspections.

I try to be open and transparent about who I am and how I feel. I like to say that I’m a man of much inertia: when I’m in motion, I stay in motion and when I’m at rest, I stay at rest. I’m naturally somber but I’m often very animated and vibrant. I pride myself on self-awareness and becoming the observer. I grapple a lot with self-improvement. I love numbers and quantitative thinking. I think science is awesome. Introspection is a huge part of who I am and how I spend my time. I believe sharing the uncomfortable insights I discover can help set a model for others to learn more about themselves and improve.

🤖 I am an emotional rationalist.

I made this term up. It means that I aspire for unachievable rationalism in an inherently emotional brain (“my” own). I consider attempted human rationalism to be a paradoxical concept: it is a trait that differentiates us as a species yet we continually show that we don’t possess it any form. We must pursue it despite knowing it is impossible to achieve.

🎉 I was named “America’s Most Awesome Man Ever 2012.”

Lol.

🏀 I’m an obsessive sports fan.

I’ve worked/consulted for professional sports teams like the San Francisco 49ers and Miami Heat, but more than anything I like watching sports and bringing a quantitative and analytical lens to understanding the game within the game.

🏥 I’m a health nerd and optimizer.

I’ve worn a CGM, done countless tests, full body MRI’s, and am continually intrigued by how we can better understand the complex system that is the human body and how to drive it.

What am I interested in?

Some of the ideas/areas that have been most influential to me and my thinking:

• Buddhism and the deconstruction of the self

• Moral Psychology

• Environment Design

• Power Laws and Compounding

• Asymmetric Upside and Leverage

• Empirical Thinking

• Antifragility

• Probability Theory

• Stoicism

Here are some of key questions I think about:

• How can we reform the broken healthcare system?

• How do you build a company when you don’t know how to?

• How can you learn to think for yourself and how do you chart your own course?

• How can I better understand my emotions and their effect on my decision making?

• How will we leverage technology to improve society and the physical world we live in?

What’s some work I’ve done?

On Healthcare

You can find my manifesto on the challenges of changing healthcare here (CNBC)

Check me on out the Impossible Healthcare podcast here

On Envisioning the Future

From my blog: “On Risk and Imagining the Future”

On Sports

You can read my prior publication in the Journal of Sports Management

On Machine Learning

Here’s my guidance on how to design Machine Learning projects (Weights and Biases Spring 2019 cohort):