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.
