General Partner @ ScOp VC

I am a hands-on investor, helping companies develop ML products and scale teams. Professionally, I spent ten years at Graphiq, a startup which we eventually sold to Amazon, where I remained for three years until 2020. At Graphiq we built one of the largest general knowledge graphs and developed natural language understanding and generation technology. Our system now powers the majority of Alexa’s open domain question understanding and answering, across all knowledge categories and in all locales/languages in which the product is available. At Amazon I managed a team of 130, comprised of software developers, product managers, and knowledge engineers. My technical expertise is in structured data and conversational systems. In 2022-2023, I was CEO of one of ScOp's portfolio companies, HeyTutor; where we deliver tutoring services to public school children across the country. I have also spent a lot of time thinking and experiment with management and organizational approaches to optimize product/software development and foster innovation. I'm particularly interested in companies that turn complex data into rich experiences/products. My academic background is in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics, followed by a short stint as a PhD. student in Financial Mathematics. I decided to drop out of my doctorate when a professor presented a proof for a stochastic process which resulted in infinite probability and refused to provide an intuitive explanation- this led me to conclude I was more of an engineer than a mathematician after all. Now I can claim having graduate education or brag about being a dropout, depending on the suitability of the context. My favorite academic subject was Information Theory, and I enjoy applying this lens when thinking about probabilistic problems (information gain leads to higher probability).