About

We’re still in the early days of the Computing Revolution. The first general-purpose digital computers were powered on less than a century ago, and our parents and grandparents remember a world substantially without them. Thinking machines are shockingly new, and we really have no idea what (or perhaps who) they are yet. We’re in the middle of an epochal transformation whose nearest precedent is the invention of writing, or the evolution of the nucleic acid.

When computers work, they are glorious: elevating and emancipatory to the human spirit. When they don’t, they’re an Orwellian boot stamping on a user’s face. A lot of computing today doesn’t work. We build on foundations we can’t verify, trust systems we can’t inspect, and depend on software that no one truly understands.

The tools of certified computing exist: type theory, formal verification, proof assistants, zero-knowledge cryptography, etc. The problem is that they’re expensive, slow, and arcane.

I’m interested in making computing faster, better, cheaper, safer. And universally accessible for everyone.

I’m currently the cofounder and CEO of a startup Argument Computer Corporation (YC W22, Boston) that works on this. Our main project is Ix, a platform that compiles Lean 4 programs into zero-knowledge proofs — enabling anyone to verify program execution and typechecking in milliseconds against kilobyte-sized cryptographic certificates, regardless of program complexity.

Previously, I worked on the Formality programming language at Sunshine Cybernetics, on Tezos at Toqueville Group, and wrote Haskell at Serokell. Before that, I cofounded Tlon, exemplar Orwellian boot-makers and the company responsible for Urbit. I regret my involvement.

I studied math and computer science at Dartmouth, and classics at Thomas More College of Liberal Arts though I did not graduate from either. I was a Thiel Fellow in 2011 to mine asteroids (no asteroids were harmed), a research fellow at Wolfram Research, and an intern at Planet Labs and Moon Express. I graduated from Northfield Mount Hermon, and earned the rank of Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts of America.

You can reach me via email at my initials at this domain, or through my work email, which can be found in the above link.