Dhruv Bansal
Founder of Unchained Capital
Los Angeles, California
Overview
Work Experience
Co-Founder and CSO
2016 - Current
Unchained Capital (https://www.unchained-capital.com) provides multisig, collaborative custody and financial services to long-term holders of bitcoin.
Co-Founder
2014
I provided consulting services through Perfect Timing, LLC. - Design/architecture for new (big) data/cloud/AI systems - Code/design review of workflows/pipelines - Identifying the best path through an application/system scalability bottleneck - Providing an automation model for a workflow or environment - Performing technical due diligence on potential key hires, acquisitions, &c.
Director
2013 - 2014
In 2013, CSC acquired Infochimps, the startup I previously co-founded. My work at CSC continued the same themes and projects I had started at Infochimps but in a much larger corporate context. I enjoyed leading my team of consultants in finding new customers for the (now) CSC Big Data Platform as well as educating teams within CSC about Big Data & Cloud technologies.
CSC is an IT services company providing technology-enabled business solutions and services.
Co-Founder & Chief Science Officer (CSO)
2007 - 2013
Infochimps set out to be a marketplace for the world’s data. Our goals were ambitious and our team was small so we relied heavily upon open-source Big Data technology such as Hadoop, ElasticSearch, Storm (and many others), public cloud providers such as AWS, and automation tools such as Chef. This combination of BigData+Cloud+DevOps turned out to be exactly what many customers wanted so we pivoted from a data marketplace into a data technology provider by converting our internal tools into a platform that we took to market via direct sales to large Enterprise customers. I wound up working on some really cool projects, including: - A voter segmentation engine holding 200M+ regularly updated US voter records used by national campaigns for outreach during elections. - Several real-time ad networks of varying scales and complexities, both in terms of data volumes & number of sources - A manufacturing supply-chain optimization application which ate terabytes of raw data from the factory floor and helped identify which suppliers led to more defective products - A telematics application for turning the GPS data stream from end user devices into a discount on their policy premiums for a major insurer Plus countless projects that got really far but never saw the harsh light of production. We used a host of technologies in our platform, many of which I continue to rely upon for new projects today: Chef, Puppet, Hadoop (Map/Reduce, HDFS, HBase, Pig, Hive, &c.), Cassandra, ElasticSearch, MongoDB, Spark, Storm, Kafka, &c.
Infochimps is a cloud service that streamlines building and managing complex big data environments, and distills analytics.
Raised $5,650,000.00 from ff Venture Capital and ff Venture Capital.
PhD Candidate
2005 - 2011
I was a PhD student in the Center for Nonlinear Dynamics in the Physics Department at UT Austin where my advisor was Dr. Michael Marder. I studied the statistical physics of very large networks and their applications to a variety of real-world systems including the human brain, social networks, school systems, and glass formation. My dissertation focused on the structure of energy landscapes formed by the inter-molecular potential between small clusters of molecules. There exists a heuristic approach for turning these landscapes into large networks so I wrote software to simulate or "grow' these networks from a given molecular configuration as input.
Instructor
2006 - 2008
I taught the physics classes for MCAT students.
Princeton Review offers classroom-based print and online, products and services to students, educators, and institutions.
Raised $37,000,000.00 from Camden Partners.
Research Assistant
2007 - 2007
I spent another summer as a research assistant in a lab at CUNY in New York. The PI, Hernan Makse, had time series data collected from in vivo fMRI experiments. I applied time series correlation analysis to the underlying neuronal signal to identify components of the brain which fired synchronously. I assembled these components into a network of brain activity and used community detection algorithms to explore its fine structure.
Research Assistant
2006 - 2006
I spent an amazing summer as a Research Assistant at the world-renowned Perimeter Institute. I learned a lot about quantum field theory models for discrete spacetime like causal sets. I programmed Python and Mathematica simulations which I used to grow toy spacetime foams.
Research Assistant
2003 - 2004
During college I worked in the summer as a research assistant in the Department of Mathematics at Columbia University in New York. I explored an explore paradox in special relativity which combines the usual twins paradox with a novel geometry in which it's possible for two twins to have wordlines which are simultaneously geodesics and also cross.
Education
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
2005 - 2011
BA
2001 - 2005