Zach Goldman | Portfolio

some anecdotes

Was referred to OpenAI then told I was too green by a hiring manager, so cold dmed my way to the VP who I sent a video saying I'd prove a new version of RLHF worked better - in 4 days I built a fullstack site to test it with A/B tests from scratch, sat in starbucks near Seattle University to test it with 30+ Gen Z including grad students and sent them a summary of findings.

Was pitching TalkMode to Microsoft/OpenAI & thought getting the CPO of Anthropic to say it was a good idea would help. Saw an SPC hackathon with Anthropic - but got rejected. DM'd 15 SPC members, got in with 12 hours notice, booked a flight immediately. Convinced them to let me be the only solo hacker, won finalist with Yellow Pages from my nonprofit hackathon, got to go to event with CPO of Anthropic - asked him about computer use/accessibility which he said was a great idea - used in pitch later. Months later accepted as SPC member then founder fellow a week in.

Was told to let an Edge feature die: instead, bundled the PR with a Copilot fix, convinced 5 marketing directors to launch a campaign for a feature before it even shipped—then used that momentum to force product leadership to greenlight it that saved the feature and led to a 7x retention gain.

Organized the world's first AI Agents for Good Hackathon from scratch.

While dealing with the political maneuvering:

Led competitive analysis on AI Agents for Microsoft for 6 months (built a competitive analysis agent myself).
Caught & fixed two separate bugs that would have broken Windows Copilot for millions of users.
Acted essentially as principal applied scientist assigning work items (at some points reviewing PRs) to a team of 5 scientists representing the Edge org alongside GPMs from Windows & Bing in reporting & analyzing core Copilot metrics daily directly to leadership.
Balanced all of this while building TalkMode, living in a spider-infested Airbnb with bronchitis.

Back in 2023, my favorite app while learning how to run was WeavRun, an IOS app that changed the pace of the music playing when you sped up. One issue I had is that when I'd go running I'd often fall below the pace I wanted to go at but didn't get real-time feedback or motivation during the moment. I emailed the company with the feature idea, got a meeting with the Head of Product 4 days later, and came to that meeting with a full working prototype having learned Swift over the weekend. I got design feedback and an offer to be added as a developer to WeavRun so I could use it after they shut it down! I also had a buzzing mode instead of noise for folks with limited hearing. 2 years later Apple launched Workout Buddy - validating the pain point.