I find where systems are stuck and deploy capital to unstick them

Every market, every value chain, every social system has bottlenecks that quietly determine what's possible. Most go unnoticed. That's the question I keep coming back to: what's the system and where is it stuck?

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I started pulling on that thread at Intel. I was trying to figure out why some new businesses survive and others don't, so I built a database tracking what happened to them. The surprise was that the answer had less to do with the companies themselves than most people assumed. A lot of it was in the structure of the markets around them.

 

That finding led to a research collaboration with Clayton Christensen at Harvard Business School and, over time, to a computational infrastructure for mapping bottlenecks in complex systems: where value is concentrating, where it's shifting and what it would take to unstick things. Our team has applied it across a range of markets and industries on multiple continents, in both commercial and social contexts.

 

Today my work spans a few roles. I'm Chief Technologist at Ducera Partners, an investment bank that has advised on more than $850 billion in transactions. I run Growth Science Ventures, where our team manages corporate venture capital funds for S&P 500 companies and leads primary research on value chain dynamics and disruption. I'm also a partner at WR Hambrecht + Co, whose venture capital legacy includes early financings in Apple, Amazon, Google and Nvidia.

 

The same methodology that maps commercial bottlenecks turns out to be useful for understanding where social systems are stuck. Whether the system is a supply chain or social impact, the underlying questions are the same. What's the system? How does it behave? Where are the bottlenecks?

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I hold a JD, MBA and BA, and was a Fellow at Harvard Business School. Earlier in my career I helped launch a high-performance computing business at Intel that was later acquired. I've lived in Australia, Bolivia, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Nepal, New Zealand and Panama and the US. Everywhere I go, I'm fascinated by hidden patterns and any gaps between how things are supposed to work, and how they actually work. 

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