Alec built his entire career around mapping the messy, real, and human world into software. He’s fascinated by the contrast between how people think about the world and the way that computers try to model it.
Highlights
Metaweb
As an Architect at Metaweb,Alec helped build a graph-based query language and then a dynamic, introspective UI on top of it. That’s where he got hooked on using data to create user-friendly interfaces.
Alec’s work at Metaweb was eventually rolled into Google, where it lives on today in the Google Knowledge Graph. While there, Alec eventually ended up on the Google Consumer Surveys team, where he was again taking structured data and creating accessible visualizations for large sets of users.
UrbanFootprint
Alec joined UrbanFootprint, an urban planning startup, as the Founding Lead Engineer, where his focus was on front-end development. During his time there, he built out a rich geospatial application to help users figure out how to adapt cities for growth.
For Alec, the work he enjoys most as a builder is when he gets to take on the challenge of implementing a user interface that matches a person’s mental model, rather than just reflecting backend infrastructure.
Superpowers
Making raw technology more human
Our human mental model of the world is structured differently than the way computers represent it, so Alec likes to work through all the weird, anomalous, and real-world ways humans think when he’s building software.
Giving founders hope that hard things can be done
When Alec started working with our portfolio company, The Public Health Company, he built a lightweight platform that could track patients and their relationships and spread of disease. It helped the company narrow down what their product was going to be (and not be) since they were able to quickly experiment with a lightweight app.
Navigating new product areas
Alec has dug into several different industries at TheGP, where he likes to learn the “weird things he should worry about” in each industry. Then, he figures out how to solve those problems through technical abstractions.
See Also
