💡 My Mission

I’m a software engineer, turned founder, turned investor. My passion is helping other engineers start companies, and I wrote a blog post about my goal of helping 1k of them launch startups. (I should probably up that to 10k at this point, since I’m quickly approaching my initial goal 🤔)

What I have done in the past:

• Software engineer (since the late 90s) at Ziff Davis Media, Concero, marchFirst and other companies (East Coast)
• Founder of software development agency mechanikal (NYC, 2003)
• Founder of Stratus Security data API management & security platform (NYC, 2009)
• Founder of Hakka Labs (social network for software engineers) where I got advice and raised money from engineering leaders at Twitter, Salesforce, Pinterest & Spotify (SF & NYC, 2012)
• 🤓 ****Founder of the world’s first global data engineering conference, AI Council (fka Data Council) which I have run around the world since 2015 (SF, NYC, Barcelona & Singapore)
• 👨🏻‍🏫 Mentor at 500 Startups in SF helping early stage founders find product-market fit
• 📈 Syndicate lead behind the top data & AI syndicate on AngelList
• 📈 Founder and General Partner of the Zero Prime Ventures (backed by Sequoia, Founders Fund, Foundation Capital, AngelList and dozens of top founders and engineers in data)

I believe most problems in tech can be solved by pooling together knowledge and experience at scale - which is why my focus for the past decade has been on building global communities of engineers and deeply technical folks. Working in and around OSS has taught me a lot over my career (one of my all-time favorite reads is The Cathedral and the Bazaar)

<aside> 🏔️ My mission is to help 10,000 Engineers start companies

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If you want to understand what makes me tick these days, you can listen to my recent chat (20 mins) that covers both AI Council and Zero Prime (previously known as Data Community Fund) on the Data Stack Show: