Last updated: October 13, 2008.
With David Greenspan, I founded AppJet Inc. Our product, EtherPad, is a popular collaboration tool.
My main role is technical product leadership and software development, though as CEO, I oversee all aspects of the business.
AppJet received initial funding from YCombinator and raised an additional seed investment from a group of angel investors in silicon valley.
I worked in the Search Quality group on the Universal Search project. I researched and prototyped new ranking algorithms and user interfaces for blending different kinds of media into a single results page. My specialty was images, and I invented a new algorithm for classifying queries based on whether images would be relevant to include with the search results.
Before working in search quality, I worked on re-architecting the orkut.com web application to meet scaling needs at a time when the site was experiencing over 500 million pageviews/day and crumbling under the load. It's now quite fast.
David Greenspan and I founded Robocraft, a programming competition for college students in the Boston area. We had the idea after winning a similar competition our freshmen year of school. We sold sponsorship to high-tech companies looking to recruit software engineers, and by my senior year we had $100,000 in revenue.
The competition is under new management and is now called BattleCode. More information is available at http://battlecode.mit.edu.
I led an effort to build tools for Microsoft Word specifically designed for users who wrote English as a second language. This included market research, product design, and applied computational linguistics. I invented a new algorithm for correcting common ESL mistakes and managed a team of engineers to develop a prototype.
For 5 consecutive summers, starting my junior year of high school, I worked in software development internships for the MITRE Corporation in Burlington, MA; Nokia Research Labs in Burlington, MA; and BBN Technologies in Cambridge, MA.
B.S., Mathematics with Computer Science (June 2005). GPA: 4.9/5.0.
Pursued a diverse course of study around theoretical mathematics, computer science, software engineering, linguistics, and business.
Took advanced math courses while in high school (math e-21a and e-21b).
GPA: 4.0/4.0.