About me
I'm a builder, entrepreneur, and investor.I've started many companies and sold a few. My first was in college; I sold it my junior year and dropped out. My "first love" was Inventables. It opened many doors like speaking at TED, meeting amazing people, and it had a modest outcome. My biggest success was Mystery Science (YC S17). I co-founded this with Mystery Doug, and it became the most widely used science curriculum in American schools (and outside of school, kids have viewed videos hundreds of millions of times on YouTube). This business had a great sale to Discovery Education in 2021. As part of this deal, I spun off a side project to continue working on it as a new company: The Explanation Company. We were building an app for kids to get great explanations to all their questions. We had a great founding team, and raised $10M from great investors led by a16z, but I failed to turn this product into a success. Product-market fit is hard, even after achieving it multiple times before.
These days I'm back in exploring mode. I've been investigating the capabilities of AI while building a personal Jarvis and offering this open-source alternative to ChatGPT. I've also been very excited by the growth of the private space industry over the last decade. I've made a few strategic investments in the industry (SpaceX, Care Weather, Alba Orbital, and Albedo), and I'm exploring a few startup ideas.
- I lived in SF for a decade and now live in Austin
- I've been building on the internet since the BBS I ran in 1994
- I spent a short time as a product manager at Facebook back in 2010
- We live in the best time ever in the history of the world. The fundamental driver of this progress is good ideas and their application, most evident in the tremendous advancements of science and technology over the past few hundred years.
- A small group of talented people, gathered together with a shared purpose, can have a significant impact on the world.
- The most important meta skills are learning how to manage your own psychology and identify the implicit philosophic ideas that you hold.
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