Head of Operations
Hello,
I’m currently Head of Operations at Profluent, a startup developing machine learning models that can read and write biomolecules. I discovered operations as a prototype designer when I realized designing user flows was analogous to designing business processes.
As a prototype designer I worked in a computer vision and NLP setting, first as an early MetaMind employee, and later as a founding member of Salesforce Research. Prior to that, I founded a design agency in Napa Valley.
Broadly speaking, I love thinking about culture, incentives, systems, and tasks. And, how each relates to products, processes, and the people that interact with them. I get work done with: 11ty, Figma, Git, Javascript, Node, SVG, Unix, Notion, Rippling and more.
On weekends I ski, mountaineer, paraglide, and make nerdy spreadsheets.
Profluent / Head of Operations
November 2022 - Present @ Berkeley, Ca
Grew business operations from first hire to tenth hire. Planned and executed team building and value alignment exercises. Implimented and administred payroll, onboarding, compliance, benefits, device management, spend management, and certain acounting & financial planning functions. Launched a website. Negotiated better rates and terms with vendors and screened agreements for red flags.
Salesforce / Designer Who Codes
April 2015 - January 2021 @ Palo Alto, Ca
Founding member Salesforce AI Research Team that grew from tens to hundreds. Cultivated a design culture within our unit and contributed dozens of innovation projects annually.
Design Education, taught a curriculum and created a design kit to empower researchers to create compelling figures. Held office hours for design feedback and made over 50 technical diagrams and 2D animations illustrating novel concepts in Nature, ACL, ICLR, NeurIPS papers and blog posts.
AI Economist, designed a game interface for a virtual economy which captured data from human players. Visualized implementation details and led the effort to create 3D video animation. Published in Science Advances. Featured in MIT Tech Review, Financial Times, and more.
Einstein Voice, co-created an early prototype which evolved into Salesfoce’s voice assistant. Version one used name entity recognition and intent classification to trigger Salesforce APIs, authenticate, and perform basic CRUD. Multiple spin off projects exploring search, service, and sales followed.
Salesforce Research Website, planned, designed, built, and maintained the team website. Aligned leaders through workshops and created written and graphical content. Programmed the final website with NodeJS, Express, npm scripts, LESS, Docker, Jenkins, AWS, and Ghost CMS. Collaborated with security, legal, and marketing teams to completion.
Documentation, designed the initial computer vision and NLP documentation. Applied Pew Research standards to survey API users and distilled findings for our team.
MetaMind / Designer Who Codes
February 2015 - April 2016 @ Palo Alto, Ca
First design hire at a successful deep learning startup – funded by Khosla Ventures. Owned product design and marketing design. Acquired by Salesforce for $32.8 million.
Nixie Agency / Founder
November 2012 - February 2015 @ Napa Valley, Ca
Founded a design agency in the Napa Valley. Clients include ZD Wines, di Rosa, Grgich Hills, the city of Napa, Napa Valley Art Museum, Arts Council Napa Valley.
ZD Wines / Marketing Assistant
August 2012 - May 2013 @ Napa Valley, Ca
Planned and built the inaugural Amgen Tour of California & ZD Wines partnership website. Designed all print collateral for hundreds of guests. Photographed Patrick Dempsey and cyclist athletes for marketing.
Adrian Gregorutti / Architectural Photographer
April 2009 - April 2013 @ Napa Valley, Ca
Crafted beautiful imagery for numerous Napa Valley wineries and Bay Area architectural firms. Many of which were published in The New York Times, Vogue, Architectural Digest, Robb Report, and others.
Pacific Union College / Journalism & PR (BS)
2007 - 2012 @ Napa Valley, Ca
Pacific Union College / Photography (AS)
2007 - 2012 @ Napa Valley, Ca
Pacific Union College / Extracurricular
2007 - 2012 @ Napa Valley, Ca
Astronomy tutor, student association officer, yearbook editor, campus newspaper photo editor, band leader.
The AI Economist: Improving Equality and Productivity with AI-Driven Tax Policies
Figure & Interface Design @ Science Advances
Deep learning-enabled breast cancer hormonal receptor status determination from base-level H&E stains
Figure Design @ Nature Magazine
Learning to Retrieve Reasoning Paths over Wikipedia Graph for Question Answering
Figure Design @ ICLR
PHOTON: A Robust Cross-Domain Text-to-SQL System
Figure Design @ ACL
SParC: Cross-Domain Semantic Parsing in Context
Figure Design @ ACL
ProGen: Language Modeling for Protein Generation
Figure Design
XLDA: Cross-Lingual Data Augmentation for Natural Language Inference and Question Answering
Figure Design
Explain Yourself! Leveraging Language Models for Commonsense Reasoning
Figure Design
Design Consultant
University of California, San Francisco
Public Affairs (ADSO-PA)
US Coast Guard Auxiliary
AIARE 1
American Institute for Avalanche Research & Education
Open Water / Advanced Open Water / Rescue Diver
Professional Association of Diving Instructors
P1 / P2
US Hang Gliding & Paragliding Association
GitHub, Google Scholar, LinkedIn, Twitter
Ball Lightning; Bargaining for Advantage: Negotiation Strategies for Reasonable People; Billion Dollar Lessons; Death’s End; Forecast: What Physics, Meteorology, and the Natural Sciences Can Teach Us About Economics; Good to Great ; Leaving the Atocha Station; Math Without Numbers; Nudge; Principles; Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind; Tao Te Ching; The Alchemy of Finance; The Ascent of Money; The Dark Forest; The Order of Time; The Pleasure of Finding Things Out; Thinking Strategically: The Competitive Edge in Business, Politics, and Everyday Life; Understanding the US Government; Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; Zero to One.