Present
I am the founder of Ephla Bio, a biotech company making therapeutics targeting B-cell pathologies. Also, I’m a sector-agnostic angel/seed investor in tech startups, including Deel, Wish, Pilot, Padlet, BioRender, BigHat Biosciences, Rossum and SourceGraph. I'm an adjunct professor teaching BIODS 253 — Software Engineering for Scientists during Winter Quarters at Stanford University. I also spend a good amount of time thinking about how poor Software Engineering is setting Science back, and what we can do to fix it. If you're working on these problems, please drop me a line!
Past
From 2002 to 2009, I was a software engineer/manager at Google, where I built various distributed and infrastructure systems. After my startup, Mitro, exited to Twitter, I led Twitter's New York engineering office and managed several consumer engineering projects, including Moments. Subsequently, I was an entrepreneur in residence at Benchmark Capital. Consulting with PACT Pharma, a cancer immunotherapy biotech company, opened my eyes to the potential of software to change science, and that area has been my focus ever since!
I often write articles:
Software is Eating Science
I fixed a Linux kernel bug in the veth driver
I discovered that NYC’s Taxi and Limousine Commission released improperly anonymized taxi logs
I analysed how employees collaborated across sites at Twitter.
Future
I’m most interested in applying machine learning and other computational techniques to therapeutics, especially for blood cancers. Additionally, I am keenly interested in improving the quality of software engineering in the sciences. If you've been thinking about improving scientific tools, or something similar, please email me or DM me (@vijayp).