Hello!

My name is William Simon Wolf / שמעון זאב, but I go by willium online. You can find me on 𝕏 or LinkedIn. I live in New York these days, but San Francisco is the the center of my world, and Tel Aviv has my heart.

Most recently, I founded Gestalt. We built tools for semi-structured data, enrichment, simulation, and visualization to help consumer companies understand their customers, and used them ourselves to find product opportunities.

That work led us to build Hotline, a multi-modal AI assistant seniors could reach by phone, text, or email without downloading anything new. We found that seniors were deeply underserved by consumer technology. Nobody was really building for them. So we did.

My previous startup, Bayes, built tools for visual exploratory data analysis and interactive data storytelling. We used declarative visualization grammars and constraint-based optimization to automatically find the best visual encodings for any dataset. Bayes was backed by Y Combinator and Amplify Partners, and was acquired by Airtable in 2021.

Bayes was rooted in my earlier research at UW's Interactive Data Lab, where I contributed to Vega-Lite and worked at the intersection of statistics, ML, and design.

Before Bayes, I worked at Twitter on Trust & Safety, building data-driven enforcement systems for misinformation, election interference, and harassment.

Erstwhile, I cut my teeth on product marketing and analytics at Oscar Health, international development research at the Harvard Kennedy School, visual data journalism at FiveThirtyEight, social products at tbh, mobile canvassing at Change.org, and what would become UberEATS at Uber.

I studied Computer Science with an emphasis on Data Science at the University of Washington in Seattle.

I ocassionally write essays about the things I'm thinking about. I'm always on the lookout for co-conspirators, thought partners, and friends.

I love to travel and meet strangers, and I'm an avid tea-drinker, beach-runner, weight-lifter, sunset-watcher, and book-reader.

If you'd like to, please don't hesitate to reach out.