About me

Hi, I'm Cole. Once upon a time I was an SF-based startup founder. Now I'm in the UK teaching machines to read the world's oldest writing: cuneiform.

I spent six years (2016–2022) as Co-founder & CTO of AbstractCRE, an enterprise product enabling commercial real estate asset owners to extract structured data from property-related documents (leases, loans, etc.), generate reports, and connect the data to other systems of record. Still alive (and growing!), the company is in great hands.

Although I knew it was time to move on from AbstractCRE, I had no clue what my next undertaking would be or where I'd find it. But having dropped out of Stanford to build AbstractCRE (cliché, huh?) and excited by the prospect of engaging with curiosity, free from the financial and social pressure of the first go-around, I decided to actually finish undergrad (cringe, huh? Being a dropout is so much sexier than having a dumb diploma...). Only took a few weeks back in school, I found my next calling in an ancient history class of all places: cuneiform. (See: Why cuneiform?) The skill set Assyriology needed was the exact one I had just spent years honing. As the old saying goes: history is written by the guy with a B2B SaaS background.

Since October 2024, I've been at Oxford studying Akkadian, Sumerian, and Elamite through the MPhil Cuneiform Studies. After I finish this degree in June 2026, I plan to stay here for a DPhil.