About

An O(n) person in an O(log n) world

This is my personal repository for bits of knowledge, both for me to remember and to share with others who might have the same problem. There is a distinct lack of good places to put these notes.

As for me:

  • I worked for TCV, a $20+ billion AUM venture capital firm in the SF Bay Area, where I was an early engineer in the Data Intelligence Group. Built a very interesting data platform combining data from 20+ data sources to support investment decision-making.
  • I built the web crawling backend and ETL infrastructure for Habeas Corp, a US lawyer database / search engine, that also powered Laterally.com and some internal legal recruiting systems.
  • I was a co-founder at Ark.com, a search engine for social network profiles that was also YCombinator-funded. This was the only thing I did worthy of a Wikipedia page (that probably should have been purged years ago).
  • I was a co-founder of Popcuts, a Y Combinator startup and a past winner of the SXSW Startup Accelerator in the Music category, which attempted to use social and financial incentives to let users predict the next hit indie song. At Popcuts, I designed and implemented most of the backend infrastructure, as well as some of the algorithms for identifying and incentivizing early adopters of hit songs.
  • Before all of that startup fun, I worked on some exciting stuff at ( the now woefully defunct ) Yahoo! Research Berkeley with some amazing people.

In my former academic life, I was a Ph.D. student in Information at UC Berkeley, pursuing various interests in search & information retrieval. I received a Master’s degree in Information from UC Berkeley in 2008, and a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Northwestern University in 2006.

I can be reached at yliu (at) ischool berkeley edu (place the appropriate missing symbols where they belong in an email address).