Advisory Board

Zach Aysan

Zach Aysan is a Canadian data scientist and cybersecurity expert.
 
Zach cofounded Algo Anywhere in 2011 with Adam Gravitis. Algo Anywhere commercialized a machine learning methodology Zach invented and it was ultimately acquired in 2012 by 500px, one of Canada’s most celebrated startups. Though officially Chief Data Scientist at 500px, the unexpected departure of the 500px CTO left him and Adam in charge of all of the engineering, until 500px landed Andreessen Horowitz as a Series A investor in 2013.
 
After 500px, Zach founded Venn in late 2013 with Jaco Joubert and Justin Giancola. Though they started by primarily contracting to startups and the occasional mid-sized agency, within a couple of years they’d begun to work with larger organizations. During this time he saw how the compounding effects of institutional bureaucracy, lack of awareness, and misaligned incentives have left many of our larger enterprises exposed to cyber security vulnerabilities. So in 2016 he started getting involved by working to communicate these problems to the organizations involved while also communicating exposure to various government departments and representatives around the world.
 
In late 2016 Jaco and him quietly wound down consulting to focus more effort on other projects like CityAction.
 
Since 2010, Zach has organized and presented at events targeting the Canadian tech community including Toronto Hacker News Night, Pycon Canada, Pixel Hack Day, Ember Night, and Lean Coffee. As his work lead him to interactions with people outside of the startup community, he came to the realization that there’s a large and growing distance between what startup employees and founders understand and see coming, and what the rest of society is aware of and ready for.
 
Zach authored Zero-Width Characters, Text Fingerprinting Update, and Self-Crashing Cars. He earned his BASc at the University of Waterloo.
 
Read Terrorists Could Use Teslas to Kill Us. View his Facebook page. Read his AngelList profile and GitHub profile. Follow his Twitter feed.