I'm a professional geek. I work in venture capital for Index Ventures.
My main passion is figuring out how the world works and how to hack it better. You might find me writing code, playing with data or just reading a paper on psychology.
I've also written a popular webcomic; invented a ubiquitous interview question; help run some crazy events and given some even crazier talks.
While working on my first startup I started drawing a comic strip as a form of relaxation. Slightly embarrassingly it was more popular than my startup reaching over one million readers.
(Although one strip on social networking blues going viral was responsible for most of that!)
In 2007 I invented the Fizzbuzz interview question for developer competence.
It took off after I blogged about it and is now one of the most popular developer interview questions in the world.
Facebook and Microsoft use it. It's been taught at Stanford, Berkley, Caltech and countless other universities.
SeedTable is a popular startup research website I built as a side-projects. It provides in-depth analysis of startup financing data on a city and sector basis.
It's received extensive press coverage (see press section below) and is frequently used by Investors, Corporate Development teams and Startup Founders.
While trying to visualize country data for a blog post I was writing I became frustrated with how ugly existing Treemap visualisation tools were.
So naturally being a geek I built my own Javascript library to make attractive Treemaps.
Turns out others agreed with my sentiment. Users have included The Los Angles Times who used it for their 2012 US Election coverage.
I've given talks about startups, tech and marketing
Past speaking gigs have included UCL (as a guest lecturer), Over The Air, Hacker News London, Barcamp, ProductCamp and LeanCamp (invited speaker)
I've also done a few silly Ignite talks including "Sticking Crayons in Brains" and "Cryptic Crosswords" (At Bletchely Park home of British Code-Breaking!)
I've helped run events with hundreds of participants including Barcamps, Hackdays and MozFest.
As well as contributing to a number of open source and open data projects I was heavily involved with Wikipedia during it's founding years
I helped design many of it's fundamental policies and wrote over a million words across thousands of articles. I also co-chaired the Wikimedia Foundation's first board-of-trustee elections.
I originally started working for Index on a freelance basis before joining them full time.
I primarily work on sourcing new deals through internal research, advising on technically sophisticated startups and on internal projects supporting our portfolio companies.
I ran the tech and business side (marketing, sales, ops, finance) of a developer recruitment startup.
It reached 7,000 developers a month with customers including Cisco, Nokia, MetaSwitch Networks, Net-a-porter, deviantArt, Mendeley and The Telegraph.
I worked on a major eFX trading desking leading development of high performance algorithmic pricing of currencies.
The system was responsible for pricing billions of dollars of currency transactions on a daily basis.
I initially worked on Bloomberg's key Equity pricing (AQR, VWAP) and calculation engines (CIX, TCA) before joining the Fixed Income team where I lead developent of a credit derivative swap platform.
The apps I worked on were used by 100,000+ Bloomberg Terminal customers.
In the pre-Facebook days I built one of the first sites focused on making viral apps. It worked by leveraging the network effects of Livejournal (an early social blogging platform).
Memeland peaked at 300,000 visits/month.
I double-majored in Mathematics and Computer Science focusing on pure mathemtics, cryptography and machine learning.
See my research section below for publications
Other than for Fizzbuzz I'm mostly known in CS circles for my undergraduate thesis Reinforcement Learning in Board Games which became the key reference work in it's (admittedly somewhat narrow) field. It's recieved over 50 citations.
In mathematics I discovered a new emperical approach for solving Andrica's Conjecture. My solution was later extended by Tena to cover Legendre's conjecture and Ruiz's conjecture.
It also got me my first mention in print in the book Prime Numbers: The Most Mysterious Figures in Math.
While at university I got involved with the Oxford English Dictionary as a reader and got sucked into the world of etymology research
My etymology research has been cited in Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction and The Yale Book of Quotations
I've also used an etymological research approach to to push back the earliest known attestation dates for numerous classic card and board games.
I've conducted extensive research on startups over the years with Seedtable being the most recent example.
Past research has included the first ever analysis of YC performance; my analysis persuaded competitor TechStars to adopt a transparency policy.
I've also written extensively on the UK startup scence looking at VC and Seed funding.
The best way to get ahold of me is either via E-mail or Twitter; or alternatively to finding me at an event.
Currently based in West London; generally happy to grab a coffee and chat about tech, startups and events.