About Me

I'm working on better ways to program robots at Throbol

Previously, I was a partner in Y Combinator, a new kind of venture firm specializing in early stage startups. YC has funded and helped more than 3000 startup companies.

I founded Umbrella Research in 2001. We developed the Anybots brand of telepresence robots, now operating as a separate company. We also developed research robots including Monty, a teleoperated robot with arms and Dexter, a human-sized two-legged walking robot.

Before that (1995-2001) I was a co-founder of Viaweb, which made easy end-user e-commerce software. I developed the merchant order processing and statistics systems. We were acquired by Yahoo, and our product became Yahoo Store.

As a grad student at Harvard (1993-1998) I worked on randomized network protocols, randomized compiler optimizations, and other random things. I published in the proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM, IEEE Infocom, and Usenix. Download the papers.

I've also done a number of recreational hacking projects and published the results on the web, such as the balancing scooter, improved keyboard, and ultra-realistic Apple ][ mode for xscreensaver.