After several wonderful years at Nebula.io, other passions that began as small side projects have begun to take on significant (time-consuming) lives of their own...
My heart remains with Nebula, its product and its people (many of whom are pictured), but the moment has come for me to move into the more limited role of Executive Advisor.
I can’t resist continuing to be actively involved at this exciting time for the firm, so I’ll be keeping a close eye on internal Slacks and emails as well as attending key meetings with investors and clients when I can.
There are some people at Nebula that I’ve been working side by side with daily for a decade (Ed Donner) or nearly a decade (Andrew Vlahutin, Gareth Moody, Benjamin Saphier and Jeffrey Fenster) — through several New York offices (of highly varying quality!), countless table-tennis tournaments, a global pandemic and the shift to (mostly) remote work (still today), allowing us to experience the joy of working with talented developers from all over the US, Africa, Europe and South America.
In that time, the Nebula product has become damn impressive. And I’m blown away by the market-leading sophistication and nuance of our machine-learning models, which include proprietary encoding LLMs, generative LLMs, agentic AI systems, and a broad range of less-sexy-sounding-but-equally-as-critical data-modeling approaches. We’ve patented key aspects of these models (particularly with respect to ignoring the sociodemographic biases that are present in all human-resources training data), published academic papers and presented on them at top conferences.
I can’t wait to see what Nebula’s data-science team comes up with next. That part of the company is in excellent hands with Vince Petaccio II and Andrew — creative, brilliant, wonderful and deeply droll humans that I sorely miss being in daily stand-ups with. It has been the greatest joy of my career to work with you (as well as past data-science team members Grant Beyleveld, Shaan Khosla and Snizhana Birkus) and you’ve combined your strengths to devise practical scientific innovations that I could never have dreamt of.
Finally, great thanks are due to my Nebula co-founders, Steven Talbot and Ed. Your commitment to and belief in the transformative potential of clever, nuanced automations in the talent-acquisition industry was prescient and is now bearing fruit. I’ve learned an absolutely monstrous amount of invaluable wisdom from the two of you over the years; I’m delighted that we will continue to remain friends and partners… at least until Steven and I both die in (separate) skiing accidents.
As for me, I’ll be continuing my dizzying (nauseating?) array of public-facing pursuits related to A.I. (e.g., my podcast, books, video tutorials, live teaching, conference keynotes, hosting more-mainstream television content).
I also have some exciting new professional adventures brewing… watch this space, I’ll be making announcements over the coming weeks :)
