About me

Hey! I'm Dan, a startup leader from Aotearoa / New Zealand, currently building a world beating startup in the LLM space.

After spending half of 2022 travelling the world, I'm now posted up in Melbourne, Australia.

Background

I have run product at several very early stage (pre product-market fit) startups. I'm a passionate self-taught generalist, and I'm comfortable jumping between dev, design and product to deliver greatness.

Beyond that I have a background in Data Science & Machine Learning from my time as a Data Analyst at New Zealand's largest online school.

Interests

I am endlessly curious, and explore many subjects in my spare time.

Recent favourites include:

  • Bartosz Ciechanowski has an insanely excellent blog that has been blowing my mind recently. I am a big fan of YouTubers like 3Blue1Brown and I Bartosz' extremely intelligent interactive blog posts offer a refreshing take on science communication. I recommend checking out Internal Combustion Engine as a starter.
  • Troy Hunt's blog. Especially his posts on how he's built various services like Password Purgatory and Pwned Passwords.

Latest Projects

Emily AI

Alistair and I decided to wrap up 2022 by directing our learnings from AI Protégé towards using LLMs for life-coaching. We built and launched Emily AI.

Next.js
React
TypeScript
Tailwind
Figma

AI Protégé

Throughout 2022 I'd been discussing working on an LLM startup with long-time friend/collaborator Alistair, and we wanted to to kick things off with a quick and fun prototype leveraging LLMs.

We thought it'd be great to chat to tech legends like Musk, Jobs and Paul Graham - AI Protégé was the result. We got a great response with AI Protégé being used in over 80 countries, and extremely valuable feedback re: LLM avatars and launching LLM products in general.

Next.js
React
TypeScript
Tailwind
Figma

Danielash.me v2

I built the initial danielash.me with vanilla html/css/js for fun - which had a few limitations. I quickly reached for a framework to rebuild. My friend Schalk recommended I try Astro, a framework for building fast content-driven static sites.

Astro
TypeScript
Cloudflare Pages
Figma