I have the great privilege to be the inaugural Shanna and Eric Bass ’05 Director of Entrepreneurship at Yale SOM as well as Senior Lecturer here at SOM (and in Yale CS by courtesy). It might be the best job on Yale's campus—I get to hang out with student entrepreneurs and brilliant colleagues all day. I currently teach "Large Language Models", “Management of Software Development”, “Database Systems”, and "Start-up Founder Studies".

I was a co-founder of Rho AI where I led the early development of our flagship Pit Rho software product, which helps motorsports teams win races using nifty machine learning models. It was fun and I learned a lot on the way using Python (flask, pandas, sklearn, etc), PostgreSQL, Angular, some Golang, Docker, and other goodies. Pit Rho was acquired by GM in 2022 where our software (now much more advanced!) helps GM professional motorsports teams win races daily.

I was a consultant at RPX Corp., which acquired the company I founded, PriorSmart (see below). At RPX, I wrote code to analyze and predict the value of large patent portfolios using a variety of machine learning and NLP techniques (mostly in Python using sklearn and gensim, though I occasionally dabbled in our Ruby/Rails codebase).

I co-founded and bootstrapped PriorSmart. PriorSmart offered a variety of patent-related services including 1) patent search; 2) patent application monitoring; and 3) patent litigation alerts, the last of which was used by thousands of attorneys and in-house counsel every day. (Who doesn’t want an email alert when they’re sued for patent infringement?) I wrote all the PriorSmart code myself, though standing atop the shoulders of giants (Python, Django, flask, Google App Engine). PriorSmart was acquired by RPX Corp., where I continued as a consultant helping the RPX team build out their patent data products.

I worked at PIPRA, which is a non-profit that helps scientists in developing countries commercialize their research. At PIPRA I organized international workshops on IP and early-stage ventures particularly in Asia and Latin America. I also helped develop IP strategies for international humanitarian projects. I worked with a great team, including Professor Alan Bennett and Cecilia Chi-Ham, with whom I co-authored and was awarded grants worth about $2MM in support of PIPRA's mission.

I wrote the first paper to show the extent to which the human genome is patented: "Intellectual Property Landscape of the Human Genome", which appeared in Science. That study is widely cited and was featured in the Wall St. Journal, Wired Magazine, Scientific American Magazine, and The Onion (yes, the satirical magazine)

I co-founded Agrivida, an agricultural biotechnology company creating novel plant feedstocks and intermediates using regulated enzymes. These plant varieties substantially lower the costs for many industries including farming, industrial enzymes, and biofuels. Agrivida was funded by Kleiner Perkins and other top-tier venture investors. The company was acquired by Novus International.

I interned at the IBM Deep Computing Institute during my Ph.D. At IBM, I worked on unsupervised machine learning algorithms and wrote a modest amount of code in C, Perl, and Java.

I was a summer intern in P&G's R&D group where I did a few hundred loads of laundry each day while working on a new Tide additive based on carboxy-methyl-cellulose derivatives. It wasn’t super fun and I was pretty poor at it. They [rightly] didn't offer me a job afterward!