Investor and engineer. I build in the markets I invest in: semiconductors and data.
I'm Founding Partner of Calculated Leap Ventures, an early-stage deep tech investor, and Managing Partner of Catalytiq Group, a semiconductor strategy firm. I evaluate startups as someone who still ships: production data pipelines in Python, and this year, two chips taped out on SkyWater 130nm.
Before that, I worked on semiconductor and deep tech ventures at MITRE, on the team supporting the CHIPS Act's National Semiconductor Technology Center; I was a Partner at FedTech; and I founded Dexter Industries, an open-source robotics company acquired in 2019.
- Semi Design Jobs: a job board built only for semiconductor design roles (RTL, ASIC, verification, physical design, analog). An LLM data pipeline gathers postings from employer career sites and applicant tracking systems, then classifies, deduplicates, and expires them automatically. 800+ roles from 600+ companies; about 40K users a month.
- InvestingLists: a free alternative to Crunchbase. An AI pipeline gathers startup funding announcements from press releases, VC and accelerator sites, tech press, and SBIR awards, then structures each deal (round, amount, investors, sector). About 50K published funding records, refreshed weekly; about 17K users so far in 2026.
- Data APIs on Apify: 100+ production data APIs, all MCP-ready, used by 19K people with a >99% run success rate. Government data, investor and company data, job and hiring data, and search.
Most of the public repos below are the developer side of those APIs: Python + MCP quick-start examples, n8n community nodes (TypeScript, published to npm with provenance), and open agent skills. A few to start with:
- US Congress stock trades: congressional trading disclosures from the House and Senate, parsed into clean JSON.
- Startup investors: 10,000+ VC, angel, accelerator, and family-office firms, filterable by stage, sector, and country.
- Synthea synthetic patients: realistic synthetic health records from MITRE's open-source Synthea.
- Workday and Greenhouse job data: live postings from employer career sites.
In spring 2026 I interviewed Matt Venn, founder of Tiny Tapeout, on The Siliconimist. A few weeks later I took his advice and taped out two designs of my own through Tiny Tapeout on the SkyWater SKY130 process, written from scratch in Verilog with Claude as a pair designer. Silicon is due back in November 2026.
- Siliconimist Demoscene (run it in your browser): a 1x1-tile VGA demo. It drives 640x480 at 60 Hz, bounces a 128x128 sprite from a bitmap ROM over cycling rasterbars, and plays a square-wave chiptune on the TT Audio Pmod. About 2,800 lines of Verilog across six modules; the cocotb testbench renders frames to PNG for visual checks.
- Siliconimist Chip1: my "hello world" of silicon. A one-digit 7-segment seconds counter with a parameterized clock divider (50 MHz to 1 Hz), a 4-bit counter, and a combinational 7-segment decoder.
- Toolchain: Verilog, cocotb, GTKWave, and the Tiny Tapeout open-source flow on the SKY130 PDK; first prototyped in Wokwi.
The Siliconimist is my podcast and newsletter on chips, capital, and their geopolitical consequences.
- Dexter Industries: GoPiGo, BrickPi, and GrovePi, open-source robot and sensor platforms for the Raspberry Pi with over 1,000 GitHub stars combined. I designed the first GoPiGo and BrickPi myself. Used by Google (its Cloud Derby training ran on the GoPiGo), Amazon, and thousands of schools.
- The Shadow: a camera and OpenCV installation built with artists Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian, shown at MACBA Barcelona in 2017.
- Meeting note taker: Everyone has an AI note taker now, but this was revolutionary in 2023! Whisper + GPT meeting notes with summaries, action items, and questions asked and answered, built right after Whisper was open-sourced.
- Data and AI: Python (pandas, Pydantic, SQLAlchemy, pytest), SQL (PostgreSQL/Supabase, SQLite), Playwright, OpenAI and Anthropic APIs, MCP, agentic coding with Claude Code and Cursor
- Silicon and hardware: Verilog, cocotb, GTKWave, SKY130, C/C++ firmware (AVR, Arduino), PCB design, Raspberry Pi
- Web and infrastructure: TypeScript, Next.js, GitHub Actions, Docker, Vercel