I have a unique background that combines software engineering and mathematics, with both developer tools and AI experience.

As a student, I loved math and math competitions. In high school, I made the IMO team, competing for the American team in the 1998 IMO and winning a silver medal. In college, I was a Putnam Fellow twice. I also enjoyed programming competitions, and was part of the 8th place team in the 2002 ICPC.

For graduate school, I went to UC Berkeley, intending to get a CS PhD, but dropped out to go to Google, which had just IPO’d. I worked at Google from 2005-2009, on the search quality team, working on tools for evaluating algorithm quality, and algorithmic changes including AI to analyze web pages. (Pre-neural-net AI, to be fair.)

In 2010, I started a startup, Gamador, which raised Y Combinator funding. We made Facebook games, it made a little bit of money, and I learned a lot, but we didn’t grow fast enough to be a big success.

In 2011, I started a developer tools startup, Parse, as the CTO. We focused on the developer experience, becoming the easiest way to add a backend to your mobile application. Parse raised money from Y Combinator, and then again through a series A. We had explosive growth and were acquired by Facebook in 2013 for $85 million, where I continued to work on Parse through 2017.

For the next few years, I worked on a cryptocurrency, Axiom, which sadly did not become popular.

Since then, I have been angel investing, advising startups, and doing both paid and unpaid consulting with academic radio astronomy projects.

Recently, my love of mathematics reawakened, and I became interested in algorithmic theorem proving. I learned Lean, contributing some contest problems to mathlib, and improving the rewrite_search tactic in Lean itself. It was both exciting and frustrating. Exciting that so much was possible, but frustrating that the process was so difficult.

Thus, I created the Acorn theorem prover, with the idea of designing it from the ground up to be delightful to use, by combining modern AI techniques with thoughtful user experience design.