US Patent: 10,452,688 - Crowd Assisted Query System

Make it easy to label your data with multiple clients: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=10452688.PN.&OS=PN/10452688&RS=PN/10452688

Director of the Lab for Entrepreneurship and Development at the Institute of Quantitative Social Science

Part of the Institute of Quantitative Social Science, the lab conducts research on economic development and opportunity creation around the world. I started this to be a hub of people interested and working on issues of economic development after bumming around MIT, Harvard, and J-PAL’s centers. site.

Stanford Comparative Advantage Econ Journal Feature

This is a paper that Stanford’s Comparitive Advantage published that provides a way way to classify economic regions based off of their past venture capital activity. From the past 15 years of vc data, the paper maps out self-sustaining clusters, financial areas, tech hubs, and spatially mismatched centers. The long term question I have with this work is how we can better tap into Minneapolis’s biotech industry to create a new American biotech cluster - paper.

New America Publishes Piece and Data Visualization of Malware Markets

The think tank New America published this piece that Brian de Luna and I whipped out. The center liked the visualizations we made and then produced a standalone piece of our work on their website New America Piece.

ML model to Increase Credit to Jordanian Entrepreneurs

Built an ML model in Amman, JO to increase the amount of credit liwwa.com could extend to local entrepreneurs. As bank accounts are much rarer in the Middle East, adding to the credit crunch there, we had to get creative in how we massaged the data to find significant predictors. This was suppose to be a 3 month contract but we knocked it out in 3 weeks while living at the Sunrise Hotel on King Hussein St. where the property owner revealed he had 30,000 birds on the roof our last night.

Modeling Regional Instability through the GDELT data set, Google Big Query

Using the GDELT dataset, we built an algorithms that would classify the present day as being normal or not through comparing its news coverage to the last 3 months. The graph at the left shows a trend we’re probably all aware of, which is the increasing negativity of the news. Coincidentally, our model also independently seems to trend with the price of crude oil which we found fascinating.

Amsterdam Capital Week Keynote Speaker

Presentation to Dutch Investors and Entrepreneurs on funding climates and what cities can do via venture capital to foster more gdp. This was an awesome time as got a random call while I was in California from a woman who was like, ‘Hey, I’m from NL. The Prince loved your recent article. Want to give a speech?” For which I immediately started silently fist pumping, collected myself, and said ‘what are the dates.’ The Netherlands has an extremely interesting funding climate, especially with biotech. Other favorite moments of the trip include not being able to fall asleep due to jetlag so riding a bike around AMS at 4 am and visiting the amazing art museums.

Advisor to Oxford Sciences Innovation

Independent Consultant to Oxford Sciences Innovation, Oxford’s billion dollar venture capital fund. Primarily worked on how the university can better commercialize biotech and early stage medical treatments by mapping how regional institutions can work together more effectively. I loved working with OSI because they fund, back, and grow technology that indisputably makes a positive difference — from aids treatments to fusion power. Additionally, they have an amazing group of people out there that really took me in as a family - site

Visualization of the Past 15 Years of Venture Capital Flowing

Visualization of 57,000 investment rounds accessed via CrunchBase. Got picked up by global press, with the prince of the Netherlands also being a fan. Big shout outs to Brian De Luna, Winston Huang, and Adam Gilfix for pulling this off together. We would later make an EU focused version to present at Helsinki’s Slush Capital Conference, but it didn’t work out — yet ;)

Pragmatic Speculation: Venture Capital and Risk-Based Culture in Singapore

Fieldwork in Singapore talking with entrepreneurs, investors, and government officials on how Singapore incentivizes a knowledge economy. Singapore is an excellent case study as due to the prevalence of the People’s Action Party, it’s a living laboratory of social policy that would be politically impossible in other countries. In between interviews, I was sleeping on Liz Tai and Dylan Ho’s couches and Asian CareBear mattress respectively.