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I’m a software engineer and entrepreneur focused on modern web technologies and AI.

Here's an ongoing autobiography, which also shares the story of my by-the-bootstraps "unschooling" education: now the subject of a chapter on grit and resilience in the bestselling book Mindshift by Barbara Oakley.

An angel investor once described my core soft skill in the role of founder or early team member 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.

In the past, I coined the term "Startup Cities" as co-founder of StartupCities.org and a startup spinoff, both of which focused on why startups should build cities. I now write about Startup Cities at StartupCities.com

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.

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This is my personal portfolio, inspired by the question: "What would the opposite of the two-color template developer blog look like?"

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Contact:hello @ zach.dev
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The Problem of Possibility – Competitive Governance, Complex Systems, and Political Reform

In moments of political reform we can find an important but under-appreciated idea I call "the Problem of Possibility." This problem is that complex evolutionary systems like economies face astronomically large design spaces that they must search for adaptive fit. This challenge of ignorance and complexity is usually ignored when people talk about political economy. Rapid adaptation of a social system requires competition for scientific, not ideological or moral reasons.

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Jan 01 2013
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Book Chapters, Memoir, and Writing Published Elsewhere
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The Problem Of Possibility – Competitive Governance, Complex Systems, And Political Reform
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