zach.dev
StartupCities
StoresData
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Spotify CLI
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Claudem Ipsum
Who?I'm a software engineer and product leader focused on modern web technologies and AI.
An angel investor once described my core soft skill as: "The ability to perceive exactly what needs to be done. And then to do it."
My experience working in difficult environments around the world means that I can be trusted to get things done, even when things go wrong.
This website was built by hand, before AI.
Here's an ongoing autobiography, which shares my story of leaving school in 9th grade to join the workforce: now the subject of a chapter on grit and resilience in the bestselling book Mindshift by Barbara Oakley.
I've won several awards for economic research and have been published or interviewed in Virgin Entrepreneur, a16z's Future.com, The Atlantic's CityLab, Foreign Policy, and in academic volumes by Routledge and Palgrave MacMillan.
In a past life, I coined the term "Startup Cities" as co-founder of StartupCities.org in Guatemala City and a startup spinoff, both of which focused on why startups should build cities. This was originally a fringe idea, but has now attracted significant capital and founder interest in the 2020s. I sometimes write about Startup Cities at StartupCities.com
I read and collect obscure memoirs from the history of business and technology. You can find some of them in my public library. Send me your recommendations!
Wait... what is this site?
This is my personal portfolio, inspired by the question: "What would the opposite of the two-color template developer blog look like?"
Click the Start Menu to learn more. Have fun!
Contact:hello @ zach.dev
I think there's a new way to use AI for research.
Most people use AI for research in two ways:
- Open up Claude Desktop and say "research X"
- Use a Deep Research API like Gemini's
Deep Research cites its work and goes, well, deep. But it writes papers that read like bad grad school essays. It buries the relevant data in a thousand words.
"Just ask Claude" is flexible and more concise. But you end up with a bunch of random data points from dubious sources.
Most people don't realize that many of Claude's tools (like it's built-in webscraper) are lossy. It summarizes pages with cheap models. So there's lots of hallucination risk. It's slow and there's no data trail.
For StoresData, I've been working on an alternative that I call "Structured Research."
The goal is a fully auditable trail for every fact, flexibility, no hallucinations, and structured data that folds into the concepts of the domain, in my case, consumer brands.
This problem is harder than it sounds.
You end up mimicking how a smart human researcher works. How do you know which website to trust? How do you know that you should verify a particular fact with another data source? Is this fact still true or was it true only in the past? Data is scattered. It's difficult to parse.
And if you want to research a million consumer brands, as I do, you also have to make it fast and cheap.
I'm super excited to share a brand new StoresData powered by this Structured Research approach in the new few weeks.
