Transitioning from free pilots to a paid product
14 May 2020We launched our mock interviewing tool in late January of 2019. This initial product was pretty basic, but we had honest interest from a handful of job training programs. We ended up running about 10 free pilots over the course of 4-5 months. Transitioning from free pilots to a paid product was messy and awkward.
Here’s a photo of me doing a pilot kickoff at Dress for Success Northern NJ: 
How Talk Hiring got its first users
10 May 2020Talk Hiring (talkhiring.com) is an automated mock interviewing tool. To date (May 2020), we’ve conducted over 3,000 automated mock interviews with job training programs, high schools, and colleges. I’m the Founder/CEO and have been working on this business full-time since August 2018.
Talk Hiring started off as an automated phone screening tool for employers. We simply wanted to help employers save time and speed up their hiring process by automating their initial phone screens...
So you want to run a study?
01 Jul 2019We ran a study to measure if using the Talk Hiring mock interviewing tool improves interviewing skills, and we have proven that it does! Here’s a link to our study setup and results. Running this study was much harder than I thought it would be. Here are my learnings for others who might want to run their own study!
Why did we run a study?
Our product...
Foundations of Deep Learning
11 Mar 2017First blog post on the x.ai blog about Activation Functions in Neural Networks. You can read it here on Medium or here on the x.ai blog.
Ruthless Prioritization
19 Feb 2017Prioritization is one of the most complicated, contentious, and crucial aspects of building a startup. There’s always an order of magnitude more tasks that your team can take on. Making sure that your team is working on the highest value work items is vital. HBR (Harvard Business Review) just released a phenomenal article on prioritization. I’ll highlight the key points here and analyze them by pulling from my startup experience.
The 3 Interdependent Variables in...
Mailbadger: A Postmortem
19 Apr 2016At the start of junior year at Duke, I was working on a startup called MailBadger with my friend, Kirill Klimuk. Essentially, MailBadger was a two-fold enterprise software solution. It helped companies automatically follow-up with their clients, and it displayed these results in a simple, user-friendly interface organized by client or by reminder. MailBadger was going to solve the problem of requiring employees to remind themselves to follow-up with their clients. Instead of reminding...
word2vec in JavaScript
14 Apr 2016One of my personal goals is to better understand deep learning. Word2vec, an algorithm developed by Google, is one of the simplest (but still not simple!) forms of deep learning. Deep Learning is a type of machine learning when there is at least one hidden layer. Word2vec is an algorithm that develops vectors for words based purely on the assumption that similar words are often used in similar ways. By running words through this...
Alarm Clock iOS App
07 Jul 2015I share my bathroom with a roommate. Nobody likes to wake up and find your roommate in the shower. To solve this problem, I built an Alarm Clock app that shares my wake up time with my roommate. That way, I can know when my roommate is planning on waking up, and I can set my wake up time accordingly.
I use UILocalNotifications to do the wake up. These notifications work great because an internet...
NSNotification Debt
19 May 2015Disclaimer: NSNotifications are not iOS push notifications
NSNotifications are signals that can be passed globally between classes in an iOS project. Classes can send (or post) notifications to classes that listen for the notification. For more information, check out the documentation here 
Extensive use of notifications are bad for a number of reasons:
Notifications lead to poor software architecture When building an iOS app, it’s very tempting to use NSNotifications...
My First Business Ever: KoalaCab
16 Jan 2015During the summer after my freshman year at Duke, my friend and I started our first business. I built my first website. It was a taxi sharing and taxi booking website called KoalaCab (I know Uber now does this, but it was pre-Uber). We ended up booking 450 cabs during our first year of operation. 
Colleges are great places for taxi sharing because:
- Students are price sensitive and want to...