I spent years doing computational physics—PhD at USC, postdoc at Stanford, ran simulations on 163,840 cores. I was good at it, but I kept escaping into side projects, building apps that hit top-10 charts while I was supposed to be doing research. Eventually I admitted to myself that I wanted to make things people actually use.
Went into healthcare AI, then co-founded PROVEN with Ming. The way people shop is broken: guess, buy, return, repeat. I built an AI system that learns individual preferences and adapts over time—a system that closes the feedback loop. Started with skincare, expanded to other categories, scaled to $150M+.
The underlying thesis is bigger: real personalization that compounds value for the customer instead of extracting it.
Now I'm building again, trying to find the next thing that's real. I climb mountains between projects. Standing on a glacier that took a hundred thousand years to form helps me remember what I'm optimizing for.
Training and Research
Ph.D. Computational Physics (USC, Mork Fellow). M.S. Computer Science (USC). Postdoc (Stanford, Ignite Fellow). Ran the world's largest peta-flop atomistic simulation at the time. 163,840 cores on Blue Gene/P. Wrote parallel algorithms in Fortran and C++ with openMPI. Published 10 papers, got 2 Physics Review Letter covers.
Healthcare Experience
McKesson — Production ML for drug pricing and supply chain. Lyra Health — Employee #28, clinical ML for therapist matching. Watched Lyra scale from 18 to 200+ people.
PROVEN
Co-founded PROVEN with Ming. AI-powered skincare personalization. YC W18. Scaled to $150M+ revenue. Got 2 patents, won MIT AI Idol. Built end-to-end ML pipelines—data ingestion, human-in-the-loop labeling, model training, real-time inference, personalization.
Current Focus
Durin — market intelligence infrastructure. Pawgress — family AI that optimizes for something other than engagement.
Mountaineering
Glaciers on four continents. Mountaineering is good for perspective and learning to take calculated risks repeatedly.
Recognition
- MIT AI Idol — AI personalization
- Glossy Best Use of Technology
- 2 U.S. Patents — AI personalization systems
- World Record Simulations — 163,840-core peta-flop computing
- 10 Publications — 2 PRL covers, Nano Letters