Now
What I'm working on right now.
A short, dated note. Updated when the answer changes.
As of July 2026
01
Building
- → Expanding the analytics platform at Northwestern Mutual. It's configuration driven now: users compose their own dashboards and slice metrics themselves, the analytics push down to Snowflake as SQL, and almost any question comes back in seconds.
- → Preparing the platform's next act: AI native, with natural language on top of the governed semantic layer, so anyone can ask a question in plain English and trust the number that comes back.
- → Hiring and growing analytics engineers who can write production code and talk fluently with portfolio managers in the same week. The bar is the intersection, not either skill alone.
02
Thinking about
- → How investment teams can use frontier AI without losing the fundamentals — what gets delegated, what stays human, and what the next generation of buy-side workflows actually looks like.
- → The right shape for an analytics team inside a large investment manager. Centralized? Embedded? Federated? My current answer is "all three, deliberately" — and the deliberateness is the hard part.
- → Where the line is between a model that helps a portfolio manager and a model that replaces them. I think the line is much further from the manager than most vendors suggest, and the work is in proving it on real money.
03
Reading
- → Annual reports, conference call transcripts, and the kind of long-form sell-side research that still exists if you know where to look.
- → Papers and posts on agentic systems, evals, and the operational realities of running ML in regulated environments.
- → A long backlog of books on the history of asset management — the institutional memory most quants skip and then re-learn the hard way.
Inspired by Derek Sivers's /now page movement. The full reference document lives at /resume.