Venture building

In FUND II, teams use AI to build companies. Over ten sessions they choose an idea, map the assumptions that matter most, validate demand with real customers, build a prototype, negotiate founder and financing terms, and pitch the venture, with AI in the loop at every step: ideation, interview preparation, synthetic-persona rehearsal before real customer conversations, prototyping, and pitch refinement. The aim is not to pretend that a validated company can be built in ten sessions but to practice the disciplined behaviors of entrepreneurship, now that the cost of building has collapsed and the scarce skill is knowing what to build and for whom.

We designed the course from scratch for a world in which the tools available to a founding team have changed completely. AI does not replace entrepreneurial judgment, customer evidence, faculty judgment, peer critique, or team accountability; it raises the bar on all of them. A purpose-built course agent, available by voice and text, guides teams through each deliverable by asking them to make decisions, state assumptions, justify evidence, and resolve tradeoffs, gives feedback before submission, and surfaces patterns across the class for reflection sessions built around how the teams actually decided.

The company builds AI assessment software for private equity firms. Its product predicts executive performance from structured interview data and guides interviewers toward the follow-up questions that matter. The models sit on a matrix of outcomes and evidence, from career histories through short and long interview transcripts, each with its own validation protocol, and the product is in beta with clients.

I lead all of the modeling work: measurement design, model development, validation, and research and development.

FaceX built face-recognition authentication. Its product was a hashed facial-token sign-in, deployed for ticketless entry at football stadiums and in customer projects across a range of industries. The company was revenue-generating, with a team of ten at its largest.

I co-founded the company, designed and co-developed the facial-token sign-in, led product and engineering, and as interim CEO led the pre-seed fundraising.

Sports Lion was a peer-to-peer sports betting platform, launched on web and mobile, in which users bet against each other rather than against the house. The founding team subsequently pivoted to found FaceX.

I co-founded the company and led product, engineering, and marketing, and designed and built the web and mobile product.