I am a New York City based solutions architect who works with startups, non-profits, artists, entrepreneurs, academics, and innovators, helping them develop products and address business needs with technical and strategic solutions.

Artskühl

Using AI to connect Artists and Art Galleries

I trained an image classification model, which, given an image of artwork, returns galleries which represent and sell the work of emerging artists of similar aesthetic and background. In practice, the user interfaces with the model like a Google Image Search.

Please contact me if you are interested in a demo.

The Autonomous Artist

Automated creation, marketing, and sale of artwork.

The Autonomous Artist (TAA) programmatically generates artwork, shares and promotes it on Instagram, gains Instagram followers (by driving traffic to its work without the use of hashtags), and sells its work, all without human intervention.

TAA's work is often perceived to be indistinguishable of origin (whether it was created by a computer or human), passing a creative Turing Test.

I created TAA to catalyze discourse regarding whether creativity is a process which is exclusive to humans and whether machines can transition to possessing agency, having been catalyzed to do so by their creators.

Follow @theautonomousartist on Instagram.

Why We Need to Change America’s Education System

My TedxNYU Talk

In 2014, I gave a TedxNYU talk regarding the confluence of American political dissatisfaction, income inequality, and technological innovation. It is presented below in summary:

The historical analysis of wealth distribution in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France presented by Thomas Piketty in his seminal Capital in the Twenty-First Century shows that the rate of return on capital is greater than the rate of economic growth, resulting in concentration of wealth.

For decades, the growth in income after taxes for the vast majority of Americans (by average household income), adjusted for inflation, has been close to 0% . As of 2010, the richest 1% of American households controlled 34% of accumulated wealth.

Technology has been and continues to be one of the primary drivers of income inequality. As we enter The Fourth Industrial Revolution, artificial intelligence and other digital technologies will displace human labor as the means of production for work requiring low skill levels. Some go so far as to argue that technology will effectively eliminate the middle class, leaving only high-paying skill-based jobs, or low-level service jobs which cannot be automated. This technology is created by few due to its high barriers to entry (education) and owned by even fewer.

In 2014, the Congressional Midterm Election saw the lowest voter turnout since World War II, with a measly 36.4% of registered voters casting a ballot. Low turnout resulted from disillusionment: the feeling that my vote doesn't matter. This disillusionment is not unfounded; according to academic research from Princeton and Northwestern, America is not a true representational democracy but a plutocratic oligarchy.

America was founded on the ideal of equality of opportunity, however opportunity directly correlates with education. In order to empower more Americans to compete economically (both nationally and globally), I proposed prioritizing, through federal mandate, STEM within primary and secondary education curricula with an emphasis on teaching students how to ideate and code in a project-oriented manner.

The future belongs to those who can innovate, disrupt, and turn the status quo on its head, and giving students the intellectual tools to bring their ideas to life empowers them to take creative ownership of, imagine, and build the future of America and our world.

Looking back now from 2019, my talk seems prescient as to the pervasive feeling of economic disenfranchisement leading to a surge of populism, although this is not a conclusion I explicitly arrived at.

Futurus Legal Trademark Search

Co-Founder & CTO, 2016-2017.

Our online Trademark Search allowed anybody, irrespective of legal knowledge, to upload an image and/or word and receive the probability of receiving a trademark grant by the US Patent and Trademark Office.

Futurus Legal used machine learning and was the winner of Brooklyn Law School's 2016 Cube Entrepreneurship Contest.

In Mid-2017, my co-founders and I shut down Futurus Legal to focus on other professional pursuits.

I apply a systematic approach to validate ideas, develop MVPs, and find Product Market Fit, one iteration at a time.

Understand the need you are filling, excite customers, spread via word of mouth, iterate, and grow with confidence in less time and at lower cost.

My process bears from personal experience – successes and failures for a multitude of reasons – which led me to ask the question:

Why do some startups become unicorn monopolies, and others burn through funding and die or never progress beyond an idea?

Through research, conversations with founders, investors, and advisors of startups regarding their experiences and my own, I have distilled ten principled steps that answer this question. Each step, as listed here, is intentionally distilled, and has its own derivative principles to be followed which I plan to write about in detail.

1. Live in the future.
2. Solve your own problems and/or build for people who are desperate for your solution.
3. Find a co-founder – if you're not technical, somebody technical. Don't outsource.
4. Bias action; develop and test your core value proposition hypothesis ASAP.
5. Don't try to be perfect. Do things that don't scale.
6. Talk to your users, build feedback loops, and maintain product flexibility.
7. Once you have validated your value hypothesis, develop a growth hypothesis. Make decisions based on measured growth targets.
8. Stay focused, transparent, and honest.
9. Raise money, don't treat it like it's yours, and don't hire.
10. Stay default alive.

These ten principles, acted upon with disciplined ownership, drastically increase your startup's chances of success.