I build AI systems, and I help executives and organizations do the same.
I design and build my own agents rather than commissioning them, including the operating system I use to run my own week. I work alongside the people and firms I advise rather than delivering to them, so what we build together is owned outright and runs without me.
This is not a recent interest. I used machine learning at JPMorgan to analyze client data, including a model that identified clients likely to leave six months before they did. I brought machine reading of documents into fund operations at Gen II, and stood up a transformation team at SEI and trained it on AI tooling. What has changed is not my conviction but the technology finally catching up to it.
The rest of my career has been spent where technology meets how a business actually runs. I helped found Booz Allen's Value Engineering practice, built on reengineering companies for growth rather than for cost, then led transformation at JPMorgan and Citi and built the transformation function from the ground up at Gen II and SEI. I have carried a P&L as a general manager at Register.com, ran most of the business at Gen II, and led the largest hedge fund and private equity relationships at SEI.
My work starts from a view that the models themselves are becoming a commodity, and that what separates one organization from another is the context it holds, the systems it builds around that context, and whether anyone can stand behind what those systems produce.
Teaching has run alongside all of it, from a computer science teaching assistantship at Princeton to JPMorgan's firm-wide training committee to a full AI course I wrote and delivered to a school staff with no technical background. I have coached senior people throughout my career.
I am co-founder and President of Next CoLab and founding Board Chair of School in the Square. I studied computer science at Princeton, graduating magna cum laude with a senior thesis in AI titled Computers Understanding English, and hold an MBA from Stanford. I live in New York.
The Brooklyn Bridge did not officially carry that name until 1915. While it rose over the East River it went by grander ones: the lithographers sold prints of the Great East River Bridge, and when its definitive history was finally written, the book was titled simply The Great Bridge. It was radical technology, the longest suspension span ever attempted, and much of the city did not believe it could be done.
Its builders engineered for trust, not just for capability. John Roebling designed the span six to eight times stronger than it needed to be. He died of tetanus after a ferry crushed his foot during the surveys, before construction truly began. His son Washington took over and was crippled by caisson disease digging the foundations, so he directed the work through a telescope from his apartment while his wife, Emily Warren Roebling, mastered the engineering herself and carried the chief engineer's instructions to the site for eleven years. When the wire contractor was caught supplying fraudulent cable wire that could not be removed, the margin absorbed the fraud: even with the bad wire the bridge remained four times stronger than necessary, and a hundred and fifty extra wires were added to every cable anyway. Emily was, officially, the first to cross.
Here is the part the firm is named for. The bridge opened on May 24, 1883, sound in every cable, and people still did not trust it. Six days later a woman fell on a stairway at the Brooklyn approach, panic tore through the crowd, and at least twelve people were crushed in the stampede. The engineering had been proven. The trust had not. Almost a year passed before P.T. Barnum led twenty-one elephants, Jumbo at the front, across the span, part publicity stunt, part public proof, and the fear finally went quiet. The bridge has been trusted ever since, and its four original main cables still hold it up today.
The architecture made it safe. The demonstration made it trusted. A crossing needs both, and that is why this practice is built the way it is: operations engineered so the work can be stood behind, and leaders who cross first, visibly, so everyone else will follow.