I’ve spent my career helping businesses of all sizes make better decisions using data and processes. This spans my time working in management consulting at PwC, deploying Palantir at large institutions, and creating the SMB services arm at Ironclad from scratch. These seemed like pretty unrelated jobs at the time, but looking back on them today, the dots seem to line up. The thread they reveal is that I find the greatest fulfillment in empowering people to solve hard business problems in scalable ways. Following that road ultimately led me here because, as I see it, few places do this better than First Round. Empowering people to solve hard business problems is exactly where First Round shines brightest.
Someone once described this type of work to me as building an Iron Man suit for Tony Stark, and that metaphor has stuck with me (because it’s in equal parts true and cool-sounding). But it perhaps misrepresents me a little – I’m not a statistician or a computer scientist, I’m really more a psychology nerd (it was one of my majors at Northwestern) that enjoys fiddling with data (Economics was my other major). Unlike in the movies, most of what building an amazing Iron Man suit entails is understanding Tony Stark: knowing his blindspots better than he does, and responding to his needs quickly while continuously striving to anticipate them. And that’s my favorite part of the job.
In my role at First Round, I work alongside the partners to surface data insights that uncover what’s working and what needs improvement, evaluate and tweak the investment decision-making process to reduce bias and groupthink, and several other projects centered around increasing partner conviction in the decisions they make weekly to identify and serve founders. I would like to believe that the Iron Man suit this work creates around the investment team has a multiplier effect on First Round’s ability to support the beginnings of some of the most impactful institutions of our lifetime.
When I’m not subjecting First Rounders to data-related discussions, I love playing tennis, practicing the guitar, reading pop psychology books, and spending quality time with my favorite people.
