About

I started off studying neuroscience, because I wanted to understand where everything came from.

I started at U. Oregon because of a scholarship, and soon wanted to speak directly with the people who wrote the books. I emailed some neuroscience professors at Stanford, got a research position, dropped out of UO, and drove to Palo Alto. I lived out of my car for a year while learning programming and working in two neuroscience labs. I’m grateful to people who took a chance on me early on, and work to pass it on.

I transferred to study CS at Berkeley and computational neuro at the Redwood Institute. I thought the field was blocked by lack of good tools for measurement and data processing, so cofounded NeurotechX, which lives on as a large open-source neurodata / neurotech developer community.

That summer I got an email about setting up the neurotech company that would become Kernel. I joined as a founding teammate and stayed to research noninvasive devices.

After seeing the valley-of-death curve faced by science companies, I started looking at new mechanisms for funding. This led to teaming up with some friends to build TrustLabs. We built the first digital dollar to partner with a US bank (TrueUSD)—a predecessor to USDC. People told us it was too early and we couldn’t find a bank. I wrote the whitepaper and found the bank. TrueUSD grew to $200M AUM and was acquired in 2020. I got to work with an incredible team and cofounders.

Afterwards I spent time learning the modern AI stack, and worked as an early-stage cofounder to help an AI company and neuro company get off the ground.

If anything, I want to become exceptional at navigating ambiguity.

Some principles that have developed: