Hey, I'm Zach

Built a computer use agent using GPT-4V after reading the Set-of-Mark prompting paper; have some nerve damage in my arms so thought computer use would be a game changer for folks with limited mobility. Pitched the CEO of Microsoft AI on TalkMode, got IP and was visiting disability labs on the weekends for months, and wanted to integrate it back into Copilot. Saw Anthropic's CPO speaking at an event South Park Commons was hosting where only hackathon attendees were invited. DM'd 15 fellows, got invited to the hackathon, flew with 12 hours notice, was the only solo hacker, became a finalist with Yellow Pages (from a nonprofit hackathon), and asked the CPO about computer use for accessibility. Copilot and LinkedIn leaders backed it, but a senior leader blocked it. Quit & joined SPC as a member a few months later - then funded a week in.

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.

While coordinating daily Copilot metrics reporting across Edge/Windows/Bing, caught 2 bugs that would've broken Copilot for millions of users, ran competitive analysis on AI agents, and built TalkMode from an Airbnb with lots of spiders.

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. The Rutgers CS faculty also gave it their award for the most creative student project. Two years later Apple shipped something similar with Workout Buddy. I also built Extended a year before Apple's own version — an extension that let you create custom, cloud-agent-created personal Chrome extensions on any website.