I am the founder of The Roots of Progress, a nonprofit dedicated to establishing a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century. I write and speak about the history and philosophy of progress, especially in technology and industry. I am also the creator of Progress Studies for Young Scholars, an online learning program about the history of technology for high schoolers, and a part-time technical consultant and adviser to Our World in Data. Formerly, I was a software engineering manager and tech startup founder. I was co-founder & CEO of Fieldbook, a hybrid spreadsheet-database (read my postmortem). I’ve also been an engineering manager at Flexport, Amazon and Groupon, and was at a few other startups as co-founder or early employee. Long ago I helped build a biotech supercomputer for D. E. Shaw Research. Full resume on LinkedIn.
