The people behind
the work.

2014

You've just been rejected from medical school, the only one you applied to, because you'd unexpectedly but happily had a baby girl, and leaving Northern Nevada wasn't an option. Broke, living above your in-laws' garage, you needed to stay intellectually alive. Graduate-level math seemed reasonable: it paid a $1,000/month teaching stipend, you love to teach, and you hoped your math minor would carry you through.

One afternoon, a soft-spoken student you barely knew asked if you wanted to study for the combinatorics exam. You declined, worn down by that new-parent exhaustion that lives in your bones. How hard could counting be?

Grade: 68. The lowest score you'd ever received, anywhere. It only curved to a B+ because the whole class had bombed it.

Later, that same student asked how you did. “I did ok, missed a little.” He smiled. “Same. Missed a little.” Something in his tone caught you. “How little?” Grade: 98.

That was the moment the H-1B visa stopped being a policy and became lived reality. Your definition of talent evaporated into thin air. The IQ playing field you assumed was closely packed, wasn't. LeBron was guarding you now, and the crossover that worked in high school had to go. His name was Ehsan, from Iran, and he'd go on to quietly dominate nearly every PhD-level math course, not because he needed to prove anything, but because it was simply the water he'd always swum in. He's now one of your closest friends.

To stay in this league, you rebuilt your discipline from scratch, shoved down years of catch-up, and learned to talk to a computer as fluently as the English on this page.

2016

It's 1:30pm and Game Theory at UNR just let out. Your next class, Statistics of Financial Engineering, is at UC Berkeley, 3 hours and 37 minutes away, and it starts at 6pm. You're crossing your fingers there's no traffic. Out by 9pm; the drive home is dark but quicker, and you roll into bed between 12 and 1am. Sleep is short, because you teach Math 126 at 8am at Western Nevada College, you're back at UNR by 12pm, and you've still got exams to grade.

2019

Still teaching at UNR, you get a LinkedIn message from someone who just sold their startup to Franklin Templeton Investments. They've seen your GitHub and want you to interview. It reads like spam. It wasn't. You land the role, the Wall Street “Data Scientist” job you'd wanted for years, except it's in San Mateo, and you'll need to leave graduate school with just a few classes remaining. They offer remote Thursday and Friday, the exact days you have your daughter in Reno. So you ask the only question that matters: can you live in San Mateo Sunday through Wednesday and Reno Wednesday through Sunday? The Berkeley drive was just a warmup. Reno to San Mateo and back every 3 days, 4+ hours each way, sometimes 13+ when winter closed the Sierra pass.

The Infinity Fund was spawned out of an insatiable desire for excellence. Every mile of that commute is in the work now.

Off the clock

When I'm not heads-down in models and markets, the best parts of life take over. Most of my time goes to the three who matter most: my daughter, my wife, and a 3-year-old Cavapoo convinced she runs the house. I'm unapologetically addicted to the Reno Ice adult hockey league, helping it grow off the ice and lacing up to play every chance I get. I also have a soft spot for new founders working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, finance, and mathematics. It's the same crossroads that rewired my life, so I give whatever time I can to help them through the questions I didn't have answers to just a few short years ago.