CEO And Co-Founder
Meta, A Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Project
Nov 2010 - Feb 2017 · 6 yrs 4 mons
I co-founded Meta while I was in grad school, together with my unstoppable sister
Amy, who is an engineer and entrepreneur. In my role as CEO, I set the overall
and product vision, team / market / AI strategy, recruited multiple generations
of our team, set company and product goals with the executive team, managed our
substantial group of shareholders, and reported to the board.
I lead and managed
through challenge and change, staff in multiple countries / offices, the usual
startup roller-coasters, commercializing in a tough specialized market, and an
acquisition that involved moving a large group of Canadians and their families
to the Bay Area. I raised several rounds of financing for the venture, starting
with friends & family round -> seed -> institutional series A and then a subsequent
round that we didn’t end up needing to close.
We pioneered many things with Meta,
including aggregating nearly all closed-access full-text scientific content
(~$1B in value) in broad text-mining partnerships with hundreds of publishers / thousands
of journals, we commercialized predictive technology from the IARPA FUSE project
(originally created for US intelligence agencies) from SRI International, and built
the world's largest scientific knowledge graph.
We were one of the earliest AI companies to come out of Canada - leveraging UofT's
great machine learning research labs to build our team, largely before the big tech
companies got to them. We were in the process of building out our pharma predictive
analytics business when the company was acquired by the CZI.
Meta was the first company in history to be acquired by a philanthropy to make its tech
and data available to all.
Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Just Bought an Artificial Intelligence Startup.
Meta Technology helps doctors sift through the thousand of research pappers published daily.
