A month ago, I announced my departure from Qualtrics ending with one word: Onward.
Today, I’m excited to share where onward leads: I’ve joined Aaru!
Spending the last few decades measuring how people feel and behave has taught me something universal. We are unreliable narrators of our own lives. When we ask people what they’d like to buy, who they’d vote for, which ads they’d click, etc., often, they answer with good intent and honesty. Yet, the actual choices they make often do not line up with the intentions they just expressed. Memory isn’t perfect, and the pressures of life often bend people away from expressing what they’d really do.
I’ve spent my career trying to get closer to predicting what people will do. From prediction engines to weighting systems, I’ve come to believe the next leap in understanding behavior will come from simulation. I’ve waited my entire adult life for AI to reach this point, where it can finally help us clear data hurdles that used to be impossible to cross.
Aaru builds multi‑agent simulations of entire populations: millions of AI agents, each grounded in real‑world data and behavior, predicting how people actually respond to a product, a price, a policy, or a campaign. These agents can handle hypotheticals reliably and answer hundreds of questions without fatigue, all while avoiding the human biases that make us such unreliable narrators.
I am lucky now to see it happen now in real time. In a single day, for example, Aaru simulated and delivered EY’s six‑month Global Wealth Research Report, and in every place where the simulation diverged from the original findings, the simulation was more accurate in its behavioral estimation and prediction.
I’ve always worked at the intersection of statistics, ML, and real business outcomes, and now I’m fully integrating AI into that toolbox. It’s the hardest and most exciting problem I’ve found in my career.
Aaru's investor Redpoint just led a Series A at a $1B valuation, with teams at EY, Accenture, IPG, and many others already leveraging Aaru's platform. We're a small team in NYC building toward whole-world simulation – and we're hiring engineers and researchers who want to build the future with us. If that's you, my inbox is open. DM me on LinkedIn if you’re curious, and we’ll set up a conversation.
Onward!
