Hello, I'm Zak
b. 1999 🇬🇧
Now 🇺🇸

I like to build things, digital things mostly.

My most recent project that I'm particularly proud of is an enterprise operating software system I designed and built at 19 called Telos AI which was venture backed by UC Berkeley's Skydeck incubator program. Our mission, in short, was to make the cognitive OS from Minority Report into a real thing.

Telos is a Massively Intelligent Operating System to faciliate the kinds of mega projects companies and countries are working on in the 4th industrial revolution. It can simulate digital, computable real time objects for every single facet of a company, whether or not they exist in the real world of the digital: tractors, people, IoT devices, ships, toilets, sales metrics, KPIs, assets from third party services like Dropbox, Box, Figma, Adobe, Oracle; you name it.

The objects are entirely computable and can interact with each other so that they're AI actionable and API compatible, but also renderable and interactive via different interfaces such as text, tables, 2D canvases, and even 3D via AR/VR -- so that humans can update, read, and understand all aspects of an enterprise just as easily as the AI can.

It was an ambitious project that we were often advised to scale back on, to think more "SaaS app" rather than "Minority Report Reality Now!" Fitting and truthful advice indeed for someone looking to build a house, but not for someone looking to construct a cathedral.

Prior to working on Telos I was teaching software engineering at Hack Reactor (now Galvanize), a coding bootcamp in San Francisco. I started teaching there fulltime at 17 right after completing the program myself, intermittently working on various projects (a P2P encrypted file sharing site, an app for traders to find correlations between news events and market performance, a social Chrome extension for countering fake news, etc.) and hackathons around the Bay Area.

Before that I sold a small gaming technology startup to a Brazilian server company I built at 14 as a side project whilst studying at Stanford's OHS (then EPGY) program. The company was dedicated to building technology and plugins for games like Minecraft and multi server administration/scaling. I built that company using a computer assembled from components I received from AMD. I had just read about Steve Jobs coldcalling Bill Hewlett and successfully asking him for a job, so I decided to do the same. I scraped the internet to find the email addresses of every Silicon Valley CEO I could think of to ask for components. After many words of encouragement from various secretaries and assistants, I finally got a response from AMD's CEO, Rory Read. He sent me a very kind letter along with computer parts.

I'm currently looking for a new project to work on, preferably at companies building stuff I care about and use everyday or just something cool that other people really care about.