Hey, I'm Zach

Had pitched the CEO of Microsoft AI on TalkMode, built it personally after getting IP, and wanted to integrate it into Microsoft or OpenAI. Saw Anthropic's CPO speaking at an event SPC was hosting where only hackathon attendees were invited. DM'd 10 fellows for a coffee chat, got invited to the hackathon, flew with 12 hours notice, became a finalist with Yellow Pages (from a nonprofit hackathon), asked the CPO about computer use for accessibility in a recorded video, went back to pitch Microsoft with proof of competitors liking the idea. Later quit & became a member - a week later was funded as a founder fellow.

Had a referral to OpenAI's human data team, spent a week sitting in a Starbucks near UW & interviewing 30 grad/undergrads on if ranking items on a tierlist outperformed pairwise comparisons for gathering preference data in RLHF training.

Was told to let an Edge feature die. Bundled the fix with a Copilot PR, got marketing support, and made the case to ship it. Ended up driving a 7x retention gain.

Organized an AI Agents for Good Hackathon focused on nonprofit use cases.

During that stretch at Microsoft:

• Ran competitive analysis on AI agents for 6 months.
• Caught two bugs that would have broken Copilot for a lot of users.
• Coordinated daily Copilot metrics reporting across Edge, Windows, and Bing teams.
• Built TalkMode on the side from a not-great Airbnb while sick.

In 2023 I was using WeavRun (a running app that syncs music to pace) and wanted real-time coaching when I slowed down. Emailed them the idea, got a meeting with the Head of Product, and showed up with a working Swift prototype I'd built over the weekend. They offered to add me as a developer. Added a vibration mode for runners with limited hearing. Two years later Apple shipped something similar with Workout Buddy.