{ "site": { "title": "Aoi Senju", "description": "Technical founder and operator. Co-founder and CEO of Colabra, building AI for M&A due diligence.", "url": "https://aoisenju.com", "image": "gallery/IMG_4278.JPG", "email": "aoi@colabra.app", "location": "San Francisco, CA", "topics": [ "AI for M&A due diligence", "private equity workflows", "startup building", "high-stakes decision systems", "fraud and credit modeling", "energy finance", "battery technology", "cleantech", "chemical engineering" ], "socials": [ { "label": "LinkedIn", "href": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/asenju/" }, { "label": "X", "href": "https://x.com/aoisenju" }, { "label": "Medium", "href": "https://medium.com/@aoisenju" }, { "label": "Crunchbase", "href": "https://www.crunchbase.com/person/aoi-senju-c495" } ], "sameAs": [ "https://www.linkedin.com/in/asenju/", "https://x.com/aoisenju", "https://medium.com/@aoisenju", "https://www.crunchbase.com/person/aoi-senju-c495" ] }, "pages": [ { "key": "home", "title": "Home", "htmlPath": "index.html", "markdownPath": "index.html.md", "description": "I pick directions and commit to them. Every company I've built started with a specific thesis about where an industry was heading and what was missing. I got into clean energy because I had a clear idea about what the field needed. I started Colabra because I saw a gap in how buy-side M&A diligence gets done. The result is a body of work that looks less like a resume and more like a series of bets, each one placed with conviction.", "category": "core", "url": "https://aoisenju.com/index.html", "markdownUrl": "https://aoisenju.com/index.html.md" }, { "key": "about", "title": "About", "htmlPath": "about.html", "markdownPath": "about.html.md", "description": "", "category": "core", "url": "https://aoisenju.com/about.html", "markdownUrl": "https://aoisenju.com/about.html.md" }, { "key": "posts", "title": "Posts", "htmlPath": "posts.html", "markdownPath": "posts.html.md", "description": "The newer posts are about building Colabra, selling into M&A, and using AI as a founder. The older archive is from 2016 to 2018, when I wrote frequently about energy, climate, and technology. I leave it all up because it shows how I reason from first principles.", "category": "core", "url": "https://aoisenju.com/posts.html", "markdownUrl": "https://aoisenju.com/posts.html.md" }, { "key": "publications", "title": "Publications", "htmlPath": "publications.html", "markdownPath": "publications.html.md", "description": "Research papers, patents, and other technical artifacts from the battery and energy chapter of my career.", "category": "core", "url": "https://aoisenju.com/publications.html", "markdownUrl": "https://aoisenju.com/publications.html.md" }, { "key": "timeline:colabra", "title": "Co-founder and CEO at Colabra", "htmlPath": "timeline-colabra.html", "markdownPath": "timeline-colabra.html.md", "description": "Building Colabra from pharma and scientific R&D software into AI for buy-side M&A diligence. Product, sales, fundraising, hiring, and building a go-to-market motion precise enough for high-stakes buyers.", "category": "timeline", "slug": "colabra", "url": "https://aoisenju.com/timeline-colabra.html", "markdownUrl": "https://aoisenju.com/timeline-colabra.html.md" }, { "key": "timeline:mission-lane", "title": "Senior Data Scientist at Mission Lane", "htmlPath": "timeline-mission-lane.html", "markdownPath": "timeline-mission-lane.html.md", "description": "Senior data scientist on fraud and credit decisioning. The year I got to see what production ML actually feels like inside a consumer bank: thresholds, approvals, losses, and the operating judgment that has to sit around any of it to make it work.", "category": "timeline", "slug": "mission-lane", "url": "https://aoisenju.com/timeline-mission-lane.html", "markdownUrl": "https://aoisenju.com/timeline-mission-lane.html.md" }, { "key": "timeline:jumpstart-energy", "title": "Founder and CEO at Jumpstart Energy", "htmlPath": "timeline-jumpstart-energy.html", "markdownPath": "timeline-jumpstart-energy.html.md", "description": "Founded and sold Jumpstart Energy. The first company I built that had to change shape under me because reality refused to cooperate with the original plan.", "category": "timeline", "slug": "jumpstart-energy", "url": "https://aoisenju.com/timeline-jumpstart-energy.html", "markdownUrl": "https://aoisenju.com/timeline-jumpstart-energy.html.md" }, { "key": "timeline:24m-technologies", "title": "R&D Engineer, Advanced Development at 24M Technologies", "htmlPath": "timeline-24m-technologies.html", "markdownPath": "timeline-24m-technologies.html.md", "description": "Technical lead on a $3.5M ARPA-E battery program, translating electrochemistry into product decisions that had to hold up on a real roadmap.", "category": "timeline", "slug": "24m-technologies", "url": "https://aoisenju.com/timeline-24m-technologies.html", "markdownUrl": "https://aoisenju.com/timeline-24m-technologies.html.md" }, { "key": "timeline:princeton", "title": "Princeton University at undefined", "htmlPath": "timeline-princeton.html", "markdownPath": "timeline-princeton.html.md", "description": "B.S.E. in Chemical and Biological Engineering. Battery research in Dan Steingart's lab, campus leadership, and internships that made energy feel like a business problem, not just a science problem.", "category": "timeline", "slug": "princeton", "url": "https://aoisenju.com/timeline-princeton.html", "markdownUrl": "https://aoisenju.com/timeline-princeton.html.md" } ], "about": { "title": "About", "intro": "", "paragraphs": [ "I was born in Japan and raised in New York. Before I ever opened an engineering textbook I spent about fifteen years on a pre-college conservatory track in classical piano, which turned out to be the best early lesson I ever got in how most work actually improves. You do it carefully, for longer than feels reasonable, and then you do it again. That's basically the whole thing.", "I studied chemical and biological engineering at Princeton and spent my senior year in Dan Steingart's lab pushing on zinc-bromine batteries. We got a paper into Energy & Environmental Science and filed a patent out of it, and somewhere in that process I figured out what I actually like doing: working a consequential problem until the argument is tight enough that someone else can pick it apart on the specifics.", "Out of college I went to 24M Technologies as technical lead on a $3.5M ARPA-E battery program. It was the first place I had to treat a result as unreal until it had survived a budget review and a manufacturing process, not just a lab bench. That experience ruined me, in a useful way, for the kind of science that stops at the beaker.", "I started Jumpstart Energy in 2018. The original idea was a marketplace that would move clean-energy capital into places where new infrastructure actually mattered, which was a very appealing thesis that mostly did not work. What the market kept asking for was better underwriting, so I narrowed the company down to a machine-learning credit product for solar loans, bootstrapped it, and sold it in 2019. Jumpstart was the first company I built that had to change shape under me because reality refused to cooperate with the original plan. I learned more from that than from most of the things that went right.", "After Jumpstart I spent a year at Mission Lane as a senior data scientist on fraud and credit decisioning. It's hard to overstate how different production ML inside a consumer bank feels from anything that looks like research. Every model I touched was a live set of decisions with real people on the other side of a threshold I'd set the night before.", "Philip Seifi and I started Colabra in 2021. We began in pharma and scientific R&D, then followed the market into buy-side M&A diligence, which is where the company lives today. We help deal teams turn entire data rooms into clause-cited issues lists and a clearer picture of the risks on the other side. It took me a while to see it this way, but Colabra is the place where a lot of what I'd been practicing separately up to that point finally had to work together at the same time.", "If there is one thing I think I am genuinely good at, it is taking something ambiguous and making it legible enough for someone else to act on. In the lab, that looked like writing a paper clearly enough for another researcher to disagree with me on the specifics. At Jumpstart, that meant turning a broad thesis into a narrow, testable wedge. At Colabra, it shows up every day in how I sell: I figure out where a buyer's workflow actually breaks, I name that moment precisely, and I find the smallest credible next step that gets both of us moving. In practice that means grounding outreach in the buyer's own language, writing different stories for corporate development teams, private equity firms, and advisors instead of pushing one generic deck, and using low-friction on-ramps like a historical backtest or sample issues list instead of asking someone to redesign a workflow on faith. An advisor I worked with told me my cold outreach was a superpower. I think the real thing is just that I take the time to understand the problem well enough that the outreach does not feel cold.", "Outside work I run a lot. I'm a 2:58 marathoner, still chasing the next block. I read, I still sit at the piano sometimes, and mostly I still think about craft the way I first learned it there." ], "personalNotes": [ { "label": "Personal", "title": "Classical piano", "paragraphs": [ "I grew up on a pre-college conservatory track in classical piano, studying with Dr. Stephanie Cheng and spending my summers at music festivals like Tanglewood and Brevard. As a teenager I also studied with university students at the conservatory in Valencia, Spain, which gave me an early taste of taking craft seriously outside of school.", "I competed seriously as a kid, received honorable mention at the American Protege International Competition of Romantic Music in 2010, and placed third at the American Protege International Piano Competition in 2013. In 2012 I played a winners' recital at Carnegie Hall. Piano was probably my first lesson in repetition, interpretation, and taste." ] } ], "running": { "label": "Running", "title": "Marathon progression", "intro": "Running is one of the clearest examples in my life of what compounding work looks like. This line chart shows the full arc from my first marathon to my current 2:58:34 PR.", "milestones": [ { "label": "Providence Marathon", "period": "May 7, 2017", "date": "2017-05-07", "race": "Providence Marathon", "time": "4:19:29", "minutes": 259.48333333333335, "note": "First marathon." }, { "label": "New York City Marathon", "period": "November 5, 2017", "date": "2017-11-05", "race": "New York City Marathon", "time": "3:29:56", "minutes": 209.93333333333334, "note": "First major jump down." }, { "label": "San Francisco Marathon", "period": "July 28, 2019", "date": "2019-07-28", "race": "San Francisco Marathon", "time": "3:52:41", "minutes": 232.68333333333334, "note": "A tougher day, but part of the long arc." }, { "label": "California International Marathon", "period": "December 8, 2024", "date": "2024-12-08", "race": "California International Marathon", "time": "3:06:47", "minutes": 186.78333333333333, "note": "A big step forward heading into 2025." }, { "label": "Tokyo Marathon", "period": "March 2, 2025", "date": "2025-03-02", "race": "Tokyo Marathon", "time": "3:27:30", "minutes": 207.5, "note": "Not the result I wanted, but useful fuel for the next cycle." }, { "label": "California International Marathon", "period": "December 7, 2025", "date": "2025-12-07", "race": "California International Marathon", "time": "2:58:34", "minutes": 178.56666666666666, "note": "Current marathon best." } ], "strava": { "profileHref": "https://www.strava.com/athletes/19976128", "chartTitle": "Recent training volume", "chartIntro": "Recent monthly mileage from my public Strava profile, checked on April 8, 2026.", "currentMonth": { "label": "April 2026", "distance": "38.0 mi", "time": "5:51:34" }, "recentLongRun": { "label": "April 5, 2026", "distance": "25.7 km", "time": "2:16:46" }, "months": [ { "label": "Oct", "fullLabel": "October 2025", "miles": 180.9, "distanceLabel": "180.9 mi" }, { "label": "Nov", "fullLabel": "November 2025", "miles": 185.3, "distanceLabel": "185.3 mi" }, { "label": "Dec", "fullLabel": "December 2025", "miles": 140.4, "distanceLabel": "140.4 mi" }, { "label": "Jan", "fullLabel": "January 2026", "miles": 164.4, "distanceLabel": "164.4 mi" }, { "label": "Feb", "fullLabel": "February 2026", "miles": 118.8, "distanceLabel": "118.8 mi" }, { "label": "Mar", "fullLabel": "March 2026", "miles": 218.3, "distanceLabel": "218.3 mi" }, { "label": "Apr", "fullLabel": "April 2026", "miles": 38, "distanceLabel": "38.0 mi", "partial": true } ] } }, "quickFacts": [] }, "timeline": [ { "slug": "colabra", "period": "2021 to present", "title": "Co-founder and CEO", "organization": "Colabra", "tweetEmbed": "https://x.com/ChrisJBakke/status/2042601895097962948", "hoverDescription": "Started in pharma and scientific R&D, then followed the market into buy-side diligence. Same underlying engine, much sharper problem, and a more original founder-led sales motion.", "summary": "Building Colabra from pharma and scientific R&D software into AI for buy-side M&A diligence. Product, sales, fundraising, hiring, and building a go-to-market motion precise enough for high-stakes buyers.", "details": [], "highlight": "What has stayed constant is the kind of AI we want to build: structured, auditable, and usable on work that cannot tolerate hand-waving.", "body": [ "Philip and I met in fall 2020 at an On Deck hacker house and started building together almost immediately. We were both repeat founders and both drawn to problems where messy source material and real-world decisions meet. Over the life of the company we raised about $3 million, iterated through half a dozen product shapes, pivoted from pharma R&D into buy-side M&A diligence, and built an original founder-led sales motion from scratch." ], "subTimeline": [ { "slug": "starting-colabra", "period": "2020 - 2021", "title": "The R&D thesis", "hoverDescription": "Pharma R&D looked right on paper. The budget logic, sales cycles, and willingness to pay said otherwise.", "paragraphs": [ "Philip and I met at an On Deck hacker house in fall 2020. We were both repeat founders. We were both drawn to the same kind of problem: messy source material, high-stakes decisions, and no good software in the middle.", "Pharma and scientific R&D looked like the obvious first target. The industry is one of the most acquisitive in the world. Labs generate enormous volumes of unstructured data. The workflow tools available to researchers were genuinely bad. I had spent enough time around energy research at Princeton and 24M to know what broken research infrastructure looks like. This looked like a clear opening.", "We iterated through several product shapes. Electronic lab notebooks. Project management. Data integration. Alliance-management software. Each version taught us something about what teams actually needed. The common thread across all of them was the same: large volumes of messy information, many stakeholders, and work that falls apart if the system is not trustworthy.", "None of that iteration was wasted. It is where we built file categorization, natural-language search, audit logs, role-based access, and workflow features that let multiple teams work off the same source material without losing the thread. Every one of those capabilities mattered later.", "The business logic, though, was wrong. Smaller biotech companies did not have enough budget for R&D software. Larger ones came with 12-month enterprise cycles, complex integrations, and spending that skewed far more toward clinical development than research operations. The product was real. The market was not." ] }, { "slug": "fundraising", "period": "Aug 2021", "title": "$3M raised from 80 warm intros in three weeks", "hoverDescription": "Tiered investor conversations compressed into a three-week echo chamber. Closed a $1.5M pre-seed and raised $3M total.", "paragraphs": [ "Paul Graham once wrote that the biggest thing that matters for investors in fundraising is the opinion of other investors about you. I think that is exactly right. Fundraising is not really about your pitch. It is about whether the people in the room have already heard your name from someone they trust.", "There is an invisible layer to how fundraising works in SF. The Lovable founder called it \"The Group Chat.\" It is the collective judgment that investors, founders, and operators hold about you and your company. When the wind is a tailwind, everything is easy. Investors reach out to you. When the wind is a headwind, everyone ghosts you. I did not have access to the tailwind. I had to manufacture it.", "Months before I was ready to raise, I made a list of investors who invested in our sector at our stage. Then I researched which of their portfolio companies were similar to mine. I reached out to those founders and started building relationships. Not pitching. Just getting to know them early enough that when the time came, there was context behind the ask.", "By the time we were ready to raise, that work had turned into roughly 80 warm introductions. Founders who could vouch for me and make an intro to the GP or partner at their fund.", "The key insight was compression. I fit all 80 conversations into a three-week window. Week one was lower-tier investors. Week two was mid-tier. Week three was the top-tier targets. The goal was to create an echo chamber. I wanted investors talking to each other and hearing our name from multiple directions in a short window. If you spread it out, investors who talk to other investors can scare each other off. If you compress it, they feel like this is a hot deal. You are manufacturing the tailwind.", "When investors asked when we planned to close, I never gave a date. I said we would close whenever the round filled up. If you name a date and miss it, you look weak. Saying \"when it fills up\" forces the investor to make a decision and get back to you faster, because the implication is: if you wait, you might miss out.", "We closed a $1.5 million pre-seed and eventually raised about $3 million total. The process worked not because we had some unfair advantage. It worked because we were deliberate about engineering the social proof that most founders either have naturally or never get." ] }, { "slug": "gladstone-yamanaka", "period": "2022", "title": "Closing the Yamanaka lab at Gladstone", "hoverDescription": "Flying to Japan and selling into a Nobel laureate's lab. The deal that proved the product worked in a real research environment.", "paragraphs": [ "The most important early sale was the Yamanaka lab at Gladstone Institutes. Shinya Yamanaka won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2012 for discovering how to reprogram mature cells into stem cells. His lab does not use tools it does not trust.", "Closing it meant flying to Japan and selling into one of the most demanding research environments in the world. This was not a team that would tolerate hand-waving about data integrity or workflow reliability. They needed to see it work on their own data, in their own environment, with their own edge cases.", "The deal mattered beyond the revenue. It became the proof point we reached for every time another research team asked whether Colabra actually worked in production. Not in a demo. Not on sample data. In a Nobel laureate's lab, on real experiments, at Gladstone." ] }, { "slug": "gtm", "period": "2023", "title": "Talking Biotech, Microsoft Discovery, and conversation-led GTM", "hoverDescription": "Acquired a podcast and turned 15-minute pre-interviews into the real sales meetings. Managed a Microsoft ISV partnership through layoffs and timeline slippage.", "paragraphs": [ "Most founders think of a podcast as content marketing. I treated it as a sales channel.", "I acquired Talking Biotech and repositioned it toward the commercial side of biopharma. The innovation was in the format. I ran 15 to 30 minute pre-interviews to vet potential panelists, and those pre-interviews *were* the sales-relevant meetings. Even guests who never ended up recording gave me qualification, pain discovery, and a warm follow-up path. In a three-week window, that process put me in direct conversation with John Howie (M&A, Bayer), Ray Letulle (product, Veeva), Bodo Marr (M&A treasury, Morphosys), Mitul Shah (product, Thermo Fisher), and Justin Pront and Bruce Upbin at Tetrascience. These were framed as podcast panel vetting calls, not sales calls. That is the distinction. It was not \"host a podcast to get guests.\" It was \"use the pre-interview as the meeting.\"", "Separately, Colabra was selected as one of roughly five ISV partners in the Microsoft Discovery program. I ran recurring joint sessions with a Microsoft team of six to seven people over four months: Bella Chan, Ali Zaman, Mukesh Dua, Karthik Ananthakrishnan, Nihit Pokhrel. The work covered technical integration architecture, sandbox access timelines, demo video production for Ignite, and marketing review processes.", "Then Microsoft went through layoffs that hit the Discovery BD team directly. Sandbox access was delayed from late July to mid-August, then further out. I tracked the slippage, escalated with Bella, and assessed where Colabra sat in their resource prioritization among the ISV partners. The September investor update said it plainly: \"One of a handful of companies selected for the Microsoft Discovery partner program. Decision: maintain relationship; do not depend on channel for revenue.\" That was the right call. A founder has to be able to tell the difference between a real channel and wishful thinking dressed up as strategy." ] }, { "slug": "the-pivot", "period": "2024", "title": "The pivot to M&A diligence", "hoverDescription": "Users liked the R&D product but isolated wins were not a durable market. An acquisition data room we experienced ourselves showed us the real opportunity.", "paragraphs": [ "Here is the thing about product-market fit that nobody tells you. You can have users who love the product, a published case study, and a Nobel laureate's lab on your customer list, and *still* not have a market. Gladstone was getting real value from Colabra. The product worked. The problem was that isolated customer wins were not the same thing as a durable, urgent, budgeted market.", "R&D collaboration software was not a large enough budget priority for the buyers we could reach. Smaller biotech companies could not justify the spend. Larger ones had budget, but the cycle to close them was 12 months or more, the integration burden was enormous, and their spending skewed toward clinical development rather than research operations. The unit economics of selling R&D software into that market were bad.", "The move into buy-side diligence came after we experienced an acquisition data room process ourselves. Philip and I looked at the pain and realized it was more urgent, better budgeted, and structurally similar to the problem we had already been working on. Large volumes of unstructured documents. Fragmented workflows. Permissions management. The need for reliable categorization and traceable outputs. It was the same problem in a different costume.", "We looked at other directions. Healthcare RCM. Sell-side VDR ideas. Buy-side diligence was the most natural fit, required the least one-way rebuild, and had the clearest buyer with an urgent problem. The pivot was less a reset than a tightening. We kept the core document-analysis and workflow infrastructure, changed the buyer and use case, and repositioned the product around what customers actually wanted: diligence AI software, not another place to store files." ] }, { "slug": "enterprise-sales", "period": "2024 - 2025", "title": "Enterprise sales strategy", "hoverDescription": "Backtests as on-ramps, persona-specific positioning, complement-not-replace against incumbents, and strict outreach rules.", "paragraphs": [ "I worked with a sales advisor named Max Gilbert through most of 2024. His main intervention was simple. Stop explaining the product. Start naming the exact moment the buyer's workflow breaks.", "That sounds obvious. It is not. Most enterprise software founders, myself included, default to explaining what the product does. Max retrained me to explain what breaks without it. The difference sounds subtle. In practice it changed how I write outbound, how I run discovery calls, and how I follow up.", "The first rule I internalized: ground every message in the buyer's own words. Pull the transcript from the last call. Use their language, not ours. \"Risk register\" becomes \"issues list.\" \"Automated extraction\" becomes \"reads every document.\" Speak in native M&A terms. IC-ready. Workstream. If the buyer has to translate your jargon into their own vocabulary, you have already lost.", "The second rule: stop writing one story for everyone. I pushed back on a generic funding-stage deck and redirected to three persona-specific decks. Corp dev teams care about IC-ready outputs and workstream speed. PE firms care about finding deal risks and deal-breakers early. Transaction advisors care about fitting into an existing client workflow without creating friction. One deck for all three is lazy and it does not work.", "Wedge selling became the most reliable pattern. Instead of asking someone to buy software, I offer to rerun a past deal as a backtest. With CLEAResult (Vista portfolio), we proposed a 455-file historical backtest. With Nordson it was rerunning a past deal called \"Spartan.\" With Zeta Global it was the same shape. The idea is simple: prove value inside their actual workflow before asking them to change how they work. Low commitment, verifiable accuracy, no live-deal risk.", "I also learned to sequence features deliberately. For the Sikich pilot, I built an 8-day email cadence that spaced features to avoid overlap. Gap analysis and entity risk screening did not land until Day 8, after the prospect had already absorbed the basics. Showing everything at once overwhelms. Showing too little loses momentum. Pacing matters.", "In mature accounts the question is rarely whether no tools exist. It is whether we fit alongside the systems already there. At Duane Morris, Harvey was already deployed. At Husch Blackwell, Legora was firm-wide. In both cases I positioned Colabra as complementary. SOC 2 Type 2, an Outputs disclaimer, AI subprocessor authorization, and a data loss liability cap turned out to be part of go-to-market, not overhead. Without that procurement language, enterprise deals stall at legal review and never come back.", "I developed strict cold outreach rules. Under 100 words. Cause-and-effect pain structure. Pain framed as \"finding deal risks and deal-breakers,\" not logistical tracking. Drop \"I'm Aoi\" in the first message. Never use \"asks to see the source\" in PE follow-ups. Every outreach message runs through the same framework, built on the 30 Minutes to President's Club five-stage methodology: Problem Agreement, Solution Agreement, Power Agreement, Commercial Agreement, Vendor Approval. Tier 1 ICP is mid-market corp dev teams doing 3 or more deals per year, 150-plus document data rooms, $40-80K ACV." ] }, { "slug": "acg-and-distribution", "period": "2025 - 2026", "title": "ACG, the outbound engine, and scaling distribution", "hoverDescription": "AI Pod, M&A West committee, referral networks with diligence firms, and a custom Claude Code skill framework for every outbound message.", "paragraphs": [ "The Talking Biotech playbook had a shape: earn a platform role, contribute something concrete, use it as the reason to talk to people who would otherwise never take your call. I looked for other places where that same shape existed.", "ACG was the clearest one. I got fast-tracked into membership through Gary Chang in September 2025, then got routed onto the M&A Conference Committee and Programs Committee through Yvonne Schwab. I started the AI Pod with Sabrina Ritchie, took on pod leadership, and joined the M&A West planning committee where I co-ran speaker outreach and organized the AI panel for the Napa conference. Each of those roles gave me a legitimate reason to call deal people, fund operators, and advisors I wanted to learn from. I did not have to pretend I was entitled to their attention. I was calling because the committee needed speakers.", "I also built a referral network with adjacent diligence providers. MCG Capital, Insperit, and other financial, HR, and operational diligence firms became referral partners. The idea was to make Colabra part of a bundled offer rather than a standalone tool competing for budget.", "The outbound engine itself was custom-built. Every meaningful message started with transcripts and prior emails pulled from Granola and Fireflies. Live company context came from web research and acquisition alerts. The message then ran through a custom skill framework I built on Claude Code: dedicated skills for cold outreach, discovery prep, demo planning, prospecting, and a humanizer pass at the end. The first draft already used the buyer's language. Not generic AI personalization. The *actual* words they used in the last conversation.", "I convert every call into a structured writeup with commercial implications at the bottom. Call notes that just capture what was said are useless to me. What I want out of a conversation is an updated org map, a clearer picture of who has authority, what competing tools they have looked at, and what a realistic next step actually is." ] } ], "contextSections": [], "resources": [ { "title": "Selected coverage", "items": [ { "title": "Wall Street Journal - venture investors back scientific software startup Colabra", "date": "Sep 9, 2021 - Wall Street Journal", "summary": "Coverage of Colabra following its early fundraising.", "href": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/venture-investors-back-scientific-software-startup-colabra-11631187000" }, { "title": "Forbes - This Startup Just Raised $1.5 Million To Help Scientists Share Their Data", "date": "Sep 13, 2021 - Forbes", "summary": "Feature by Jair Hilburn on Colabra and its $1.5 million raise.", "href": "https://www.forbes.com/sites/jairhilburn/2021/09/13/this-startup-just-raised-15-million-to-help-scientists-share-their-data/" }, { "title": "Green.org Person of the Week", "date": "Nov 17, 2021 - Green.org", "summary": "Profile interview about my background and work.", "href": "https://green.org/2021/11/17/green-org-person-of-the-week-aoi-senju/" }, { "title": "On Deck Founders feature - Colabra Raises $1.5 Million", "date": "2021 - On Deck", "summary": "Feature on Colabra and the early financing round.", "href": "https://joinodf.com/stories/colabra" }, { "title": "On Deck Founders - Top Co-founders: Aoi Senju and Philip Seifi", "date": "2021 - On Deck", "summary": "Feature on the Colabra founding team.", "href": "https://joinodf.com/top-co-founders-list/colabra" } ] }, { "title": "Talks and appearances", "items": [ { "title": "PEI NEXUS 2026", "date": "Feb 25, 2026 - PEI NEXUS", "summary": "Pitch slot in the High Growth Sectors room covering technology, healthcare, and energy transition.", "href": "https://live.peievents.com/nexus/speakers/aoi-senju" }, { "title": "ACG Silicon Valley Tech Conference", "date": "Feb 2026 - ACG Silicon Valley", "summary": "Startup showcase table plus a short main-stage pitch for Colabra." }, { "title": "ProVisors AI Affinity Group", "date": "Jan 12, 2026 - ProVisors", "summary": "Speaking slot on AI in M&A and how to evaluate workflow tools in high-stakes diligence." }, { "title": "IBA monthly meeting", "date": "Apr 8, 2026 - International Business Advisors", "summary": "Presenter on AI workflows and practical adoption in diligence work." }, { "title": "ACG AI \"Touching Technology\" event", "date": "Apr 2026 - San Francisco", "summary": "Organizer and presenter for an ACG event featuring AI companies demoing to private-equity attendees and founders." }, { "title": "ACG M&A West", "date": "May 2026 - Napa", "summary": "Planning committee member and organizer of the AI panel / fireside chat content for the conference." } ] }, { "title": "Case studies and product signal", "items": [ { "title": "Gladstone Institutes case study", "date": "2024 - Colabra", "summary": "Public case study from the earlier R&D chapter, useful as evidence that teams were getting real value from the product before the pivot.", "href": "https://www.colabra.ai/case-studies/gladstone-institutes" } ] }, { "title": "Writing", "items": [ { "title": "I've been building with LLMs since March 2023", "date": "2026", "summary": "The full arc of how Colabra adopted LLMs, from the first GPT ticket in March 2023 through hallucination fixes, vector search, the pivot, and prompt cache optimization today.", "href": "post-llms-since-march-2023.html" }, { "title": "How our pitch changed when our buyers got smarter", "date": "2026", "summary": "How the sales pitch evolved from feature descriptions to persona-native language as M&A buyers became more sophisticated.", "href": "post-buyers-got-smarter.html" }, { "title": "The founder's AI stack: how I actually use it", "date": "2026", "summary": "A detailed look at the skills, integrations, and workflow I use to get real leverage from AI as a founder.", "href": "post-founders-ai-stack.html" }, { "title": "What I was wrong about", "date": "2026", "summary": "Eight bets I got wrong building Colabra, and what each one cost.", "href": "post-what-i-was-wrong-about.html" }, { "title": "How I run GTM and sales with AI", "date": "2026", "summary": "The specific system behind outbound, meeting prep, follow-ups, and re-engagement, all grounded in transcripts and run through custom AI skills.", "href": "post-gtm-and-sales-with-ai.html" } ] } ], "url": "https://aoisenju.com/timeline-colabra.html", "markdownUrl": "https://aoisenju.com/timeline-colabra.html.md" }, { "slug": "mission-lane", "period": "2020 to 2021", "title": "Senior Data Scientist", "organization": "Mission Lane", "hoverDescription": "Fraud and credit decisioning inside a live consumer bank, where every model I touched was a live set of decisions on real customers.", "summary": "Senior data scientist on fraud and credit decisioning. The year I got to see what production ML actually feels like inside a consumer bank: thresholds, approvals, losses, and the operating judgment that has to sit around any of it to make it work.", "details": [], "highlight": "The year I figured out how much of any useful ML system is actually operating judgment in disguise.", "body": [ "After Jumpstart, I wanted to get closer to a scaled consumer-credit environment where the feedback loops were tighter and the consequences of modeling decisions were immediate. At Mission Lane I worked on fraud and credit models in exactly that kind of setting.", "The job was not just to improve model performance; it was to understand how models, policy, false positives, analytics tooling, and operations fit together in production. Thresholds were not abstract numbers. They determined who got reviewed, who got approved, and who absorbed the cost when the system was wrong.", "I worked closely enough to see where model quality ended and operating reality began: approval policy, underwriting tradeoffs, customer experience, and what happens when a decisioning system is wrong at scale.", "That experience made me much more interested in systems that support consequential decisions under uncertainty. It is where machine learning stopped feeling like research and started feeling like operating judgment, and where I got much more skeptical of any model that could not explain itself well enough for another operator to intervene." ], "contextSections": [ { "title": "What progress looked like", "paragraphs": [ "This was the part of my career where I got closer to live decision systems. I was working on fraud and credit decisioning in consumer fintech, where the work had to survive contact with underwriting policy, operational constraints, analytical reporting, and real customer outcomes rather than just perform well on a static evaluation set." ] }, { "title": "What decisions mattered", "paragraphs": [ "The important decisions were rarely purely modeling decisions. They were questions about thresholds, false positives, who absorbs the cost of being wrong, and how model outputs fit into a broader operating process with reporting, tooling, and engineering around it. That was a useful shift for me because it made the tradeoffs explicit." ] }, { "title": "Why it mattered", "paragraphs": [ "Mission Lane made me much more interested in the interface between analytics and judgment. It was one of the clearest bridges between my earlier technical work and my later interest in AI systems for high-stakes workflows, especially systems that need to be traceable enough for someone else to trust and override." ] } ], "url": "https://aoisenju.com/timeline-mission-lane.html", "markdownUrl": "https://aoisenju.com/timeline-mission-lane.html.md" }, { "slug": "jumpstart-energy", "period": "2018 to 2020", "title": "Founder and CEO", "organization": "Jumpstart Energy", "hoverDescription": "Started as a global clean-energy marketplace, ended up as an ML credit product for solar loans. Bootstrapped, profitable, sold in 2019.", "summary": "Founded and sold Jumpstart Energy. The first company I built that had to change shape under me because reality refused to cooperate with the original plan.", "details": [], "highlight": "My first real education in building around a commercial wedge instead of an intellectually satisfying thesis.", "body": [ "Jumpstart did not start as a lending-analytics company. The original idea was a global marketplace for clean-energy capital. That idea ran into securities law, project economics, and investor-developer mismatch. The eventual business that worked was an ML underwriting product for solar loans, bootstrapped to profitability and sold." ], "subTimeline": [ { "slug": "pre-pivot", "period": "2018 - 2019", "title": "800+ developers, 5,000+ investors, and why the marketplace was wrong", "hoverDescription": "Built a clean-energy capital marketplace with real traction, then learned the investor-developer incentive mismatch made the shape unworkable.", "paragraphs": [ "Jumpstart was conceived as a crowdfunding platform that would enable anyone to fund clean energy projects anywhere in the world. The inspiration came from a year I spent in Seattle. There are tons of solar panels in Seattle, and it is completely nonsensical. Seattle is the 8th richest city in the U.S., over 90% of its electricity already comes from hydropower, and electricity prices are among the cheapest in the country. At the same time, Puerto Rico had been without electricity for over a year. Electricity costs there were twice the national average and coming 98% from dirty fuels. I wanted to know whether investment interest could be directed to the places where it would actually matter.", "I first tried to make retail participation work. That meant crowdfunding clean energy investments from non-accredited investors. It turned out to be nearly impossible. A broker-dealer license would have cost $500K. State-by-state lending licenses added more cost and time. Filing an S1/Reg-A with the SEC is notoriously difficult. Even under Title III of the JOBS Act, projects had to be under $1 million, and the legal costs of setting up special purpose vehicles and tax equity transfer contracts meant anything under $25 million did not pencil out. I had to drop the idea of crowdfunding entirely.", "So I moved upmarket. The new shape was a marketplace connecting enterprise investors (RE100 members like Apple and Google that had pledged to offset their carbon emissions) with equity investment opportunities in vetted solar projects from developers around the world.", "For lead sourcing, I targeted lists of sustainability conferences and solar ranking lists, scraped company names and executive contacts by the hundreds, and ran them through an auto-emailing script that pinged company email servers with possible email variations based on name and domain. The script sent personalized messages to the valid addresses. Within about seven months I had reached out to more than 800 solar project developers and more than 5,000 enterprise investors, built a global network of 33 solar developer partners (some of the largest solar companies in the world), and was in conversations with five Fortune 100 companies that wanted to purchase clean energy through the platform. We also went through Y Combinator Startup School F18 and Powerhouse Access Innovation during this period. I got Green-e certified so the clean energy credits could be verified by a formal authority.", "Even though things seemed to be coming together, I began to get a bad feeling after doing deeper customer conversations about what it would take to commit capital. Solar developers had enough financing for the projects that were already obviously financeable. What they *needed* was an expansion of the projects that were considered financeable. They did not need more financing for creditworthy projects. They needed harder projects to become creditworthy. Enterprise investors, on the other hand, wanted safe projects, long diligence cycles, and trusted relationships. A Google or a Salesforce typically takes two to three years of negotiations and follow-on meetings before committing. Those incentives were fundamentally misaligned for a marketplace built around speed and liquidity. I realized that both sides were fundamentally looking for different things." ] }, { "slug": "post-pivot", "period": "2019 - 2020", "title": "ML underwriting, four enterprise customers, and a sale", "hoverDescription": "Collapsed the company to one side of the market. Built an alternative-data credit model for solar loans, bootstrapped to profitability, and sold.", "paragraphs": [ "I decided to refocus Jumpstart. The original marketplace was not going to work because the two sides wanted fundamentally different things. The available projects were too risky for the investors I could reach, and the investors who could move real capital operated on multi-year timelines and relationship-driven processes that looked nothing like a liquid marketplace.", "I made three decisions at once. First, focus on U.S. solar markets, where at least there were limited sovereign risks. Second, focus on residential rather than commercial. I wanted to leverage my data science background, and there was far more data to work with at the residential scale. 90% of commercial and industrial entities do not even have a credit score, which makes commercial financing vastly more complicated. Third, focus on a single side of the marketplace by providing a SaaS service, before trying to build out both sides. Residential gave me a tractable problem.", "I built an initial model using public solar-program data, census data, weather data, and macroeconomic data. The first version landed around 0.75 F1 and 0.85 AUC-ROC. I would not compare those metrics directly to FICO, because FICO is a score and those are classification metrics. They are not the same kind of output. The point was not that we had found some magic number. It was that we had built a system with enough real predictive signal to create customer trust and open a path into a market that standard credit thresholds were screening out too crudely. We eventually got to four paying enterprise customers.", "The habit I built here that I still use every week is treating sales as a learning system. I maintain a live hypothesis document. I kill things when the data comes back cold. I try to be honest about what I am actually seeing versus what I want to be seeing. An advisor I worked with later told me I was unusually willing to change direction when a thesis died. That willingness started at Jumpstart.", "Jumpstart was the first time I saw a company change shape because reality forced it to. The marketplace idea was ambitious and intellectually satisfying. The underwriting product was what the market could actually absorb. You do not get to keep a thesis just because you like it." ] } ], "contextSections": [], "resources": [ { "title": "Selected coverage and IP", "items": [ { "title": "Fast Company on Jumpstart Energy", "date": "2018 - Fast Company", "summary": "Feature on making it easier to invest in clean energy projects.", "href": "https://www.fastcompany.com/90255483/this-new-site-makes-it-easy-to-put-your-money-into-clean-energy-investments" }, { "title": "Integrated Machine Learning-Based Methods and Systems for Automating Financial Data Analysis and Interpretation", "date": "Jumpstart Energy - US patent application", "summary": "US patent application, docket #08059-P0001A. Filed during Jumpstart Energy and covers the technical foundation of Jumpstart's alternative-data credit model.", "href": "#" } ] }, { "title": "Founder notes", "items": [ { "title": "Post-mortem of Jumpstart (Part I/II)", "date": "Dec 19, 2019 - Medium", "summary": "My writeup of the original marketplace idea, the investor / developer mismatch, and why the first version of the company had to change shape." }, { "title": "Post-mortem of Jumpstart (Part II/II)", "date": "Dec 19, 2019 - Medium", "summary": "A closer look at the underwriting pivot, the technical model, the limits of solar lending data, and the lessons I took from selling the company." }, { "title": "Jumpstarting the Energy Market", "date": "Jun 17, 2018 - Medium", "summary": "The original long-form thesis behind Jumpstart: universal electricity access, renewable infrastructure, and why I initially believed a marketplace could redirect capital more effectively." } ] } ], "url": "https://aoisenju.com/timeline-jumpstart-energy.html", "markdownUrl": "https://aoisenju.com/timeline-jumpstart-energy.html.md" }, { "slug": "24m-technologies", "period": "July 2016 to early 2018", "title": "R&D Engineer, Advanced Development", "organization": "24M Technologies", "hoverDescription": "Technical lead on a $3.5M ARPA-E battery program. My first job where electrochemistry had to answer to a manufacturing process, not just a lab bench.", "summary": "Technical lead on a $3.5M ARPA-E battery program, translating electrochemistry into product decisions that had to hold up on a real roadmap.", "details": [], "highlight": "The first place where a result I cared about was not real until the rest of the business agreed it was.", "body": [ "At 24M I worked on advanced battery development and was technical lead on the ARPA-E IONICS project, a $3.5 million Department of Energy grant focused on high-energy-density batteries. It was a continuation of the battery work I had started at Princeton, but now with commercial constraints turned all the way up.", "The work covered active and inactive material evaluation, electrode and electrolyte specification, cell design testing, root-cause failure analysis, and cost optimization. It was the first time I had to carry technical judgment through manufacturability, budget, and schedule instead of stopping at the lab result.", "That changed how I thought about science: not just whether something works, but whether it can survive contact with reality." ], "contextSections": [ { "title": "What I worked on", "paragraphs": [ "The work centered on advanced battery development inside a next-generation battery company. In practice that meant evaluating materials, specifying electrodes and electrolytes, testing cell designs, diagnosing failures, and thinking constantly about how electrochemical performance interacted with manufacturability and cost." ] }, { "title": "What decisions mattered", "paragraphs": [ "This was the first environment where technical decisions could not stay technical for long. Every promising direction had to survive budget, schedule, scale-up risk, and the question of whether it was robust enough for a real product roadmap rather than a lab result." ] }, { "title": "Why it mattered", "paragraphs": [ "24M sharpened a habit that has stayed with me since: technical work is only half-done until it can survive real operating constraints. That instinct later translated directly into how I think about software and AI products." ] } ], "resources": [ { "title": "Related research", "items": [ { "title": "Design and Optimization of Carbon Foam Electrode for Local Confinement of Bromine in Non-Flowing Single-Chamber Zinc Bromine Batteries", "date": "2016 - ECS meeting abstract", "summary": "Electrochemical Society meeting abstract on zinc-bromine battery design and optimization.", "href": "https://www.researchgate.net/publication/363958887" } ] } ], "url": "https://aoisenju.com/timeline-24m-technologies.html", "markdownUrl": "https://aoisenju.com/timeline-24m-technologies.html.md" }, { "slug": "princeton", "period": "September 2012 to June 2016", "title": "Princeton University", "hoverDescription": "Engineering, battery research, writing, and early clean-energy operating work all happening at the same time.", "summary": "B.S.E. in Chemical and Biological Engineering. Battery research in Dan Steingart's lab, campus leadership, and internships that made energy feel like a business problem, not just a science problem.", "details": [], "highlight": "Where the engineering, energy, writing, and leadership threads first started braiding together.", "body": [ "Princeton is where the core threads of my career first came together: engineering, energy, writing, and leadership. I studied chemical and biological engineering, with certificates in finance and environmental studies." ], "subTimeline": [ { "slug": "energy-thesis", "period": "2012 - 2016", "title": "Published research in Energy & Environmental Science", "hoverDescription": "An energy thesis that started with TerraCycle and Bloom Energy in Tokyo, ran through U.S. and Japanese energy policy, and ended with a zinc-bromine battery paper.", "paragraphs": [ "The energy thread started before the lab. I chose Princeton partly because I wanted to understand the energy transition as both an engineering problem and a business problem. The internships I picked were deliberate tests of that idea.", "At TerraCycle I worked directly with the CAO on Japan expansion. I researched more than 100 Japanese companies, made dozens of cold calls and company visits, and translated both the pitch deck and the contract into Japanese. It was my first exposure to clean energy as a commercial operation rather than a policy cause.", "At Bloom Energy in Tokyo I moved between corporate strategy, sales and business development, and engineering in the company's new Japan office, built with SoftBank. I researched U.S. and Japanese energy policy and market demand. I presented my work to internal teams five times. I helped support a partnership with Uniqlo and dug into component specs for German boilers going into the Japanese market. SunPower in San Jose rounded that out with a more hands-on engineering role.", "Together, those jobs taught me one thing. The interesting problems in energy are not pure engineering problems. They sit at the boundary between engineering, economics, and execution. That conviction is what pulled me into Dan Steingart's lab. My senior thesis on zinc-bromine batteries became a peer-reviewed paper in Energy & Environmental Science. I also spent time in Bruce Koel's lab, which broadened the research beyond a single system.", "A lot of the path that followed came from decisions that looked small at the time. Choosing Steingart's lab because he was the professor who answered my email. Taking the Tokyo role because it let me work at the intersection of engineering and market strategy. Deciding that the energy transition would only make sense to me if I understood both the technical systems and the financing around them." ] }, { "slug": "campus-leadership", "period": "2013 - 2016", "title": "Princeton's first national marketing conference", "hoverDescription": "Grew Advertise This from 350 to 650 members, cut attrition from 60% to 18%, and raised $16K for a conference with 20+ execs and 300+ students.", "paragraphs": [ "Advertise This was the first thing I ran that felt like a real operating challenge. Over two semesters we grew membership from 350 to 650. We cut attrition from 60% to 18%. We ran 13 events in eight weeks. And we raised $16,000 for Princeton's first national marketing conference, which brought more than 20 marketing executives and 300 students to campus. That was a lot of logistics, a lot of cold outreach, and a lot of decisions about what to prioritize when everything felt urgent. It was a compressed version of what running a startup would later feel like.", "I also helped found the Princeton University Energy Association, wrote for the Daily Princetonian, and spent time in groups including the Asian American Students Association, Cap and Gown, and residential life.", "By the time I graduated I had spent meaningful time in academic research, student organizations, journalism, and three industry internships. That variety turned out to be useful. It kept me from getting locked into a single identity too early. The 2014 Santos-Dumont Prize for Innovation and Innovation Magazine's 2015 25 Under 25 were early signals that the mix was working." ] } ], "contextSections": [], "resources": [ { "title": "Research and patents", "items": [ { "title": "Minimal architecture zinc-bromine battery for low cost electrochemical energy storage", "date": "2017 - Energy & Environmental Science", "summary": "Peer-reviewed paper with Shaurjo Biswas, Robert Mohr, Thomas Hodson, Nivetha Karthikeyan, Kevin W. Knehr, Andrew G. Hsieh, Xiaofang Yang, Bruce E. Koel, and Daniel A. Steingart. DOI 10.1039/C6EE02782B.", "href": "https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2017/ee/c6ee02782b" }, { "title": "Membrane-free non-flowing single cell zinc bromine battery with bromine-trapping composite carbon foam electrode", "date": "Oct 2015 provisional / Jan 2020 published patent application", "summary": "US provisional patent application #62,257,546 later became published non-provisional US20200036046A1. Co-inventor with Daniel Steingart, Shaurjo Biswas, Thomas Hodson, and Robert Mohr. Assigned to Princeton University.", "href": "https://patents.google.com/patent/US20200036046A1/en" } ] }, { "title": "Awards and recognition", "items": [ { "title": "Alberto Santos-Dumont Prize for Innovation", "date": "2014 - Princeton", "summary": "Early recognition for technical and entrepreneurial work during college." }, { "title": "Innovation Magazine 25 Under 25", "date": "2015 - Innovation Magazine", "summary": "Selected for Innovation Magazine's 25 Under 25 list while at Princeton." } ] }, { "title": "Princeton and alumni", "items": [ { "title": "Princeton Alumni Weekly - Asian American Conference: Flourishing Alums Return", "date": "Nov 11, 2015 - Princeton Alumni Weekly", "summary": "Interview and feature coverage connected to Princeton.", "href": "https://paw.princeton.edu/article/asian-american-conference-flourishing-alums-return" }, { "title": "Princeton University Energy Association Alumni Interview Series, Issue 2", "date": "Nov 19, 2017 - PUEA", "summary": "Alumni interview for the Princeton University Energy Association.", "href": "https://puea.princeton.edu/energy-alumni-interview-series-1/2017/11/19/issue-2" }, { "title": "Princeton Entrepreneurship Council profile", "date": "Princeton Entrepreneurship Council", "summary": "Founder profile connected to Princeton entrepreneurship.", "href": "https://entrepreneurs.princeton.edu/people/aoi-senju-16" }, { "title": "Daily Princetonian staff page", "date": "Daily Princetonian", "summary": "Archive page from my time writing for the paper.", "href": "https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/staff/aoi-senju" } ] } ], "url": "https://aoisenju.com/timeline-princeton.html", "markdownUrl": "https://aoisenju.com/timeline-princeton.html.md" } ], "posts": [ { "title": "I've been building with LLMs since March 2023", "slug": "llms-since-march-2023", "year": "2026", "date": "2026 - Colabra", "summary": "The full arc of how Colabra adopted LLMs, from the first GPT ticket in March 2023 through hallucination fixes, vector search, the pivot, and prompt cache optimization today.", "href": "post-llms-since-march-2023.html", "url": "https://aoisenju.com/post-llms-since-march-2023.html" }, { "title": "How our pitch changed when our buyers got smarter", "slug": "buyers-got-smarter", "year": "2026", "date": "2026 - Colabra", "summary": "How Colabra's sales pitch evolved from feature descriptions to persona-native language as M&A buyers became more sophisticated.", "href": "post-buyers-got-smarter.html", "url": "https://aoisenju.com/post-buyers-got-smarter.html" }, { "title": "The founder's AI stack: how I actually use it", "slug": "founders-ai-stack", "year": "2026", "date": "2026", "summary": "A detailed look at the skills, integrations, and workflow I use to get real leverage from AI as a founder.", "href": "post-founders-ai-stack.html", "url": "https://aoisenju.com/post-founders-ai-stack.html" }, { "title": "What I was wrong about", "slug": "what-i-was-wrong-about", "year": "2026", "date": "2026 - Colabra", "summary": "Eight bets I got wrong building Colabra: Benchling, alliance managers, raise size, interaction models, sales language, pain framing, and more.", "href": "post-what-i-was-wrong-about.html", "url": "https://aoisenju.com/post-what-i-was-wrong-about.html" }, { "title": "How I run GTM and sales with AI", "slug": "gtm-and-sales-with-ai", "year": "2026", "date": "2026 - Colabra", "summary": "The specific system behind my outbound, meeting prep, follow-ups, and re-engagement, all grounded in transcripts and run through custom AI skills.", "href": "post-gtm-and-sales-with-ai.html", "url": "https://aoisenju.com/post-gtm-and-sales-with-ai.html" }, { "title": "Linus' Law: What greater collaboration could do for scientific research", "year": "2021", "date": "Feb 25, 2021 - Bio-IT World", "summary": "Bylined commentary on collaboration and scientific research workflows.", "href": "https://www.bio-itworld.com/news/2021/02/25/linus-law-what-greater-collaboration-could-do-for-scientific-research", "url": "https://www.bio-itworld.com/news/2021/02/25/linus-law-what-greater-collaboration-could-do-for-scientific-research" }, { "title": "Table of Contents / Preface", "year": "2018", "date": "Feb 26, 2018 - Medium", "summary": "The reading order and entry point for the full cleantech curriculum.", "href": "https://medium.com/@aoisenju/table-of-contents-5a571ed97f8a", "url": "https://medium.com/@aoisenju/table-of-contents-5a571ed97f8a" }, { "title": "The limits of our electrical infrastructure", "year": "2017", "date": "Apr 17, 2017 - Medium", "summary": "On the constraints of the grid and what it takes to modernize it.", "href": "https://medium.com/@aoisenju/how-to-save-the-grid-47ed52bddde6", "url": "https://medium.com/@aoisenju/how-to-save-the-grid-47ed52bddde6" }, { "title": "The next 10 years in electricity", "year": "2018", "date": "Apr 25, 2018 - NewCo Shift", "summary": "A look at where electricity markets and infrastructure were heading next.", "href": "https://shift.newco.co/2018/04/25/complete-energy-democratization-is-coming-lets-get-ready/", "url": "https://shift.newco.co/2018/04/25/complete-energy-democratization-is-coming-lets-get-ready/" }, { "title": "The decline of oil", "year": "2016", "date": "Dec 29, 2016 - Medium", "summary": "A piece on the structural pressures facing the oil industry.", "href": "https://medium.com/@aoisenju/lets-talk-about-oil-51702f7034da", "url": "https://medium.com/@aoisenju/lets-talk-about-oil-51702f7034da" }, { "title": "The rise of oil", "year": "2016", "date": "Age of Awareness", "summary": "Historical context for how oil came to dominate the modern economy.", "href": "https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/how-oil-came-to-control-the-world-91f53ddd7954", "url": "https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/how-oil-came-to-control-the-world-91f53ddd7954" }, { "title": "The failure of cleantech investing", "year": "2016", "date": "Startup Grind", "summary": "Why the first cleantech wave disappointed and what investors missed.", "href": "https://medium.com/startup-grind/investing-91d6dcc4943f", "url": "https://medium.com/startup-grind/investing-91d6dcc4943f" }, { "title": "Solar energy", "year": "2017", "date": "Medium", "summary": "A first-principles primer on solar energy.", "href": "https://medium.com/@aoisenju/solar-8092031fc85c", "url": "https://medium.com/@aoisenju/solar-8092031fc85c" }, { "title": "Wind energy", "year": "2017", "date": "Medium", "summary": "A plain-language look at wind energy and its role in the grid.", "href": "https://medium.com/@aoisenju/the-best-thing-to-happen-to-america-fd3ae3a28ce2", "url": "https://medium.com/@aoisenju/the-best-thing-to-happen-to-america-fd3ae3a28ce2" }, { "title": "Fuel cells", "year": "2017", "date": "Sep 21, 2017 - Medium", "summary": "On fuel cells, their promise, and their practical limits.", "href": "https://medium.com/@aoisenju/its-the-fuel-of-the-future-5d65e02233ea", "url": "https://medium.com/@aoisenju/its-the-fuel-of-the-future-5d65e02233ea" }, { "title": "Nuclear energy", "year": "2017", "date": "Jun 29, 2017 - Medium", "summary": "Why I don't like simplistic '100% renewables' thinking.", "href": "https://medium.com/@aoisenju/i-dont-like-100-renewables-f4a6bf149cff", "url": "https://medium.com/@aoisenju/i-dont-like-100-renewables-f4a6bf149cff" }, { "title": "Tesla and the battery revolution", "year": "2016", "date": "Dec 15, 2016 - Medium", "summary": "A piece on batteries and Tesla as a clean energy wedge.", "href": "https://medium.com/@aoisenju/the-keystone-of-clean-energy-8b77d4c6723a", "url": "https://medium.com/@aoisenju/the-keystone-of-clean-energy-8b77d4c6723a" }, { "title": "Battery materials", "year": "2017", "date": "Medium", "summary": "A breakdown of battery materials and why they matter.", "href": "https://medium.com/@aoisenju/the-next-gasoline-bcaac55b76ae", "url": "https://medium.com/@aoisenju/the-next-gasoline-bcaac55b76ae" }, { "title": "Business models of battery companies", "year": "2017", "date": "Medium", "summary": "A survey of how battery companies make money.", "href": "https://medium.com/@aoisenju/size-matters-5cf6d2132390", "url": "https://medium.com/@aoisenju/size-matters-5cf6d2132390" }, { "title": "The future of batteries", "year": "2017", "date": "Medium", "summary": "A look at what battery progress actually depends on.", "href": "https://medium.com/@aoisenju/waiting-for-a-breakthrough-97da6fceb99", "url": "https://medium.com/@aoisenju/waiting-for-a-breakthrough-97da6fceb99" }, { "title": "Energy efficiency", "year": "2017", "date": "Medium", "summary": "Why efficiency is still one of the most important levers in energy.", "href": "https://medium.com/@aoisenju/the-low-hanging-fruit-b952dc79a9e7", "url": "https://medium.com/@aoisenju/the-low-hanging-fruit-b952dc79a9e7" }, { "title": "Trump and cleantech", "year": "2016", "date": "Medium", "summary": "Why political headwinds alone could not stop clean tech.", "href": "https://medium.com/@aoisenju/trump-cant-stop-clean-tech-b2a3763b82c1", "url": "https://medium.com/@aoisenju/trump-cant-stop-clean-tech-b2a3763b82c1" }, { "title": "The Paris Agreement", "year": "2017", "date": "Medium", "summary": "A skeptical take on the agreement as a climate solution.", "href": "https://medium.com/@aoisenju/its-a-distraction-cb25e4fec6ba", "url": "https://medium.com/@aoisenju/its-a-distraction-cb25e4fec6ba" }, { "title": "Willingness to learn", "year": "2017", "date": "Medium", "summary": "A short essay on learning and intellectual posture.", "href": "https://medium.com/@aoisenju/the-will-to-learn-4a690a54dd9c", "url": "https://medium.com/@aoisenju/the-will-to-learn-4a690a54dd9c" }, { "title": "Probabilistic thinking", "year": "2017", "date": "Age of Awareness", "summary": "A piece on thinking in probabilities instead of certainty.", "href": "https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/quantum-thought-9173e53597e3", "url": "https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/quantum-thought-9173e53597e3" }, { "title": "Hidden Economic Opportunities", "year": "2018", "date": "Age of Awareness - Jumpstart", "summary": "A Jumpstart-era piece on overlooked opportunities in clean energy finance.", "href": "https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/hidden-economic-opportunities-fd308334497d", "url": "https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/hidden-economic-opportunities-fd308334497d" }, { "title": "Climate self-determination", "year": "2018", "date": "Age of Awareness - Jumpstart", "summary": "An argument for wider participation in climate investing and ownership.", "href": "https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/climate-self-determination-4c135b7a02c1", "url": "https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/climate-self-determination-4c135b7a02c1" }, { "title": "Rethinking clean energy investing", "year": "2018", "date": "Age of Awareness - Jumpstart", "summary": "A closer look at how clean energy investing should evolve.", "href": "https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/rethinking-clean-energy-investing-b70cc6dc3907", "url": "https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/rethinking-clean-energy-investing-b70cc6dc3907" }, { "title": "Why talk about climate change now?", "year": "2016", "date": "Urban Us", "summary": "A piece on urgency and the case for talking about climate now.", "href": "https://medium.com/urban-us/our-generations-greatest-challenge-ebe9497115fb", "url": "https://medium.com/urban-us/our-generations-greatest-challenge-ebe9497115fb" }, { "title": "Engineering our planet", "year": "2016", "date": "Age of Awareness", "summary": "On realism, engineering, and large-scale climate work.", "href": "https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/realism-injection-674c0ea43a7b", "url": "https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/realism-injection-674c0ea43a7b" } ], "publications": [ { "title": "Design and Optimization of Carbon Foam Electrode for Local Confinement of Bromine in Non-Flowing Single-Chamber Zinc Bromine Batteries", "date": "2016 - ECS meeting abstract", "summary": "Electrochemical Society meeting abstract on zinc-bromine battery design and optimization.", "href": "https://www.researchgate.net/publication/363958887", "url": "https://www.researchgate.net/publication/363958887" }, { "title": "Integrated Machine Learning-Based Methods and Systems for Automating Financial Data Analysis and Interpretation", "date": "Jumpstart Energy - US patent application", "summary": "US patent application, docket #08059-P0001A. Filed during Jumpstart Energy and covers the technical foundation of Jumpstart's alternative-data credit model.", "href": "#" }, { "title": "Membrane-free non-flowing single cell zinc bromine battery with bromine-trapping composite carbon foam electrode", "date": "Oct 2015 provisional / Jan 2020 published patent application", "summary": "US provisional patent application #62,257,546 later became published non-provisional US20200036046A1. Co-inventor with Daniel Steingart, Shaurjo Biswas, Thomas Hodson, and Robert Mohr. Assigned to Princeton University.", "href": "https://patents.google.com/patent/US20200036046A1/en", "url": "https://patents.google.com/patent/US20200036046A1/en" }, { "title": "Minimal architecture zinc-bromine battery for low cost electrochemical energy storage", "date": "2017 - Energy & Environmental Science", "summary": "Peer-reviewed paper with Shaurjo Biswas, Robert Mohr, Thomas Hodson, Nivetha Karthikeyan, Kevin W. Knehr, Andrew G. Hsieh, Xiaofang Yang, Bruce E. Koel, and Daniel A. Steingart. DOI 10.1039/C6EE02782B.", "href": "https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2017/ee/c6ee02782b", "url": "https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2017/ee/c6ee02782b" } ], "photoGallery": [ { "src": "https://aoisenju.com/gallery/Table photo -- 3.jpg", "alt": "Table photo from Aoi Senju gallery." }, { "src": "https://aoisenju.com/gallery/B81A9263.jpg", "alt": "Photograph from Aoi Senju gallery." }, { "src": "https://aoisenju.com/gallery/DSC04597.jpg", "alt": "Photograph from Aoi Senju gallery." }, { "src": "https://aoisenju.com/gallery/865085_1098_0044.jpg", "alt": "Photograph from Aoi Senju gallery." }, { "src": "https://aoisenju.com/gallery/IMG_6148.png", "alt": "Photograph from Aoi Senju gallery." }, { "src": "https://aoisenju.com/gallery/IMG_4278.JPG", "alt": "Photograph from Aoi Senju gallery." }, { "src": "https://aoisenju.com/gallery/20221014-CDL_Foster-Medical-274.jpeg", "alt": "Photograph from Aoi Senju gallery." }, { "src": "https://aoisenju.com/gallery/IMG_3214.JPG", "alt": "Photograph from Aoi Senju gallery." }, { "src": "https://aoisenju.com/gallery/IMG_2590.JPG", "alt": "Photograph from Aoi Senju gallery." }, { "src": "https://aoisenju.com/gallery/IMG_0214_Original.JPG", "alt": "Photograph from Aoi Senju gallery." }, { "src": "https://aoisenju.com/gallery/IMG_5342_Original.JPG", "alt": "Photograph from Aoi Senju gallery." } ], "machineReadable": { "llmsTxt": "https://aoisenju.com/llms.txt", "llmsFullTxt": "https://aoisenju.com/llms-full.txt", "sitemap": "https://aoisenju.com/sitemap.xml", "robots": "https://aoisenju.com/robots.txt", "siteData": "https://aoisenju.com/site-data.json", "profile": "https://aoisenju.com/profile.json", "timeline": "https://aoisenju.com/timeline.json" } }