A full-circle moment. Thirty years ago, I launched my first venture as a Harvard student—trying to solve a real problem. That experience set the direction for everything that followed.
I’m excited to join Harvard University's Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) as an Executive Fellow, Venture Translation & Innovation, alongside my role as Founder & Managing Partner of 1955 Capital—coming back to Harvard in this capacity, working alongside faculty and students on entrepreneurship and innovation, feels like coming home.
Over the past year, I’ve had the chance to work closely with Gary King—University Professor at Harvard, one of the leading scholars in quantitative social science and a longtime builder of interdisciplinary research platforms—to help shape the IQSS Executive Fellows Program. The program brings leaders from industry, government, and the nonprofit sector into deep, project-based collaboration with faculty across the University.
My focus is venture translation: how do we take research coming out of universities like Harvard—across the social and deep sciences—and build companies that operate at global scale?
Too much of the world’s most important research is still trapped inside universities—not because the science isn’t ready, but because the systems around it aren’t designed for translation.
At a moment when traditional pathways for funding and scaling research are under increasing pressure, the gap between discovery and real-world impact is widening—not shrinking.
Breakthrough ideas risk stalling—not because the science is lacking, but because the systems to translate them don’t exist.
This builds on my work over the past 7 years on the Dean’s Advisory Cabinet at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences with Dean David Parkes and former Dean Frank Doyle, where I’ve focused on early-stage venture formation from lab-based research—and draws directly on the experience, capital, and network we’ve built at 1955 Capital.
The goal is to build and test new models at the intersection of academia and venture—working across institutions to help world-class research more consistently become real-world impact.
Grateful to Harvard's Chief Technology Development Officer Sam Liss for making the introduction to Gary that started all of this.
If you’re working on this problem—from the academic, startup, or institutional side—I’d love to connect.
