Ethan Fast

I'm currently a co-founder at Vcreate, where we're engineering T-cell receptors to cure cancer. Previously I co-founded Nash, a platform for crypto-first banking where I'm still an advisor. I have a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford, where I worked at the intersection of human-computer interaction and machine learning. I founded my first startup in 2011, a web analytics company funded by YC.

Companies

I have co-founded several notable companies and organizations.

Vcreate

Vcreate is developing a plaform for T-cell receptor discovery based on novel assays and machine learning.
Founded 2020

Nash

Nash is a non-custodial exchange and asset management platform for cryptocurrencies and other tokens. We have developed technology that brings stronger performance and UX to non-custodial trading.
Founded 2017

Proxino

Proxino is a web analytics platform for JavaScript focused on error tracking and message logging. The company is no longer operational.
Founded 2011
Funded by Y Combinator

Research

During my PhD I did research at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction, Programming Languages, and Natural Language Processing. I led work on more than ten published projects, most of which involved significant systems building. My full publication record is available on Google Scholar but I've included a few of my favorite research initiatives below.

Empath

Empath is a text analyis tool powered by machine-generated lexicons. This work won a Best Paper award at CHI 2016.
CHI 2016
105 citations

Iris

Iris explored how we can bridge conversational agents with general purpose programming languages.
CHI 2018
29 citations

Augur

Augur learned to predict human behavior by analyzing fiction. This work won an Honorable Mention award at CHI 2016.
CHI 2016
27 citations

Trends in the Public Perception of AI

We analyzed how public views about AI shifted over a 30-year period using a large corpus of articles from the New York Times.
AAAI 2017
52 citations

Maria

We used LSTM models to predict HLA class II antigen presentation. This work was led by my partner Binbin Chen.
Nature Biotechnology 2019

Job Talks

I interviewed for tenure-track faculty positions at MIT, Harvard, and Berkeley before deciding to focus completely on my startup. Meeting and explaining my ideas to so many incredibly smart people was a unique and valuable experience.

Open Source Work

I've created a number of open source projects on Github, some of which became popular. A selection of these are below.

Neon Wallet

Neon is a light wallet for managing digital assets on the NEO blockchain. I created it in 2017 when I co-founded the open source group CoZ. It is now managed by other open source contributors. At one point Neon had more than 100,000 active users.
Published 2017

TypedJS

An experimental project to help JavaScript developers fuzz-test their programs using type annotations, inspired by Haskell's QuickCheck. This was back before type checking JavaScript was popular.
Published 2012

Gajure

A framework for implementing Genetic Algorithms in Clojure. I made this in undergrad after publishing some other work on automatically fixing program bugs with evolutionary algorithms.
Published 2010

Press

My research and industry work has been covered in venues such as the Globe and Mail, CNBC, Endgadget, TechCrunch, Canadian Public Radio, and New Scientist.

Essays

From 2009-2012 (college to early startup years) I wrote a number of short essays. I do not necessarily endorse the views of my past self. I have also written things on Medium.

Contact

I'm happy to talk about startups and research. You can reach me at ejhfast@gmail.com or @unignorant on Twitter.