Me → I grew up in Texas (Cowboys forever) and spent my teen years playing lacrosse and trying to figure out why people are the way they are (e.g., I was obsessed with the show House MD— it was the first time I noticed that what makes someone great is usually the thing that everyone wants them to fix). 

I wanted to keep pulling at the tension between what’s in our control and what isn’t, so I studied both neuroscience and philosophy. After researching the mechanisms behind anxiety disorders and teaching philosophy in prison, i have learned that our personality traits are more predetermined than we think, but also that we have far more control over our state of mind than we realize. 

Later, I spent a few years doing computational neuroscience work and running clinical trials. I was shocked by the brain’s ability to make good decisions despite how noisy all the inputs to the brain can be. A figure skater can land a triple axel on a quarter inch of steel with a balance system that is feeding her a hell of a lot of shakey signal. That’s not precision despite uncertainty…it’s precision built out of it. 

Making decisions with incomplete information isn’t rare, it’s what we were built to do. That’s why I left research to underwrite ideas and people before good data exists-- and I’ve backed gene therapies, batteries, satellites, frontier models, AI for neuroscience, and consumer hardware.