Mike Arpaia
Founder
I've spent my career building decision-support systems that combine data, computation, and human expertise to improve the accuracy, efficiency, and consistency of high-stakes decisions. With Alpine Kinetics, we're bringing that approach to snow science and avalanche forecasting.
An avid skier and climber based between Colorado and Chamonix, my life's two enduring passions are snow and computer science. I'm super motivated by the opportunity to thoughtfully apply technology to help save lives in the mountains.
- •Lead technical strategy at Moonfire, architecting decision-support systems that combine data, computation, and human expertise to improve the accuracy, efficiency, and consistency of high-value venture decisions
- •Raised over $175M and put that capital at risk behind these decision-support systems, proving their value at institutional scale
- •Built machine learning solutions and data infrastructure to optimize every aspect of the venture capital lifecycle, from opportunity identification to portfolio management
- •Direct parallel to Alpine Kinetics: the same methodological rigor that powers venture capital decision-making, applied to avalanche forecasting and mountain safety
- •Created and open-sourced osquery in 2014, the most-starred security project on GitHub and now the industry standard for endpoint security
- •Built high-performance distributed systems to instrument and monitor operating systems at Facebook-scale across production Linux, macOS, and Windows
- •Powers security operations for thousands of organizations worldwide, securing billions of devices from servers to spacecraft
- •Built machine learning systems to detect security compromise at Facebook. If Facebook was compromised, it was my job to have built and deployed the infrastructure that would detect it
- •Early adopter of Transformers at Workday in 2018-2019 (right as the BERT paper came out), architecting and deploying distributed embedding-based search and multi-document matching engines at production scale
- •Built Transformer-based company and founder evaluation systems at Moonfire since 2020, applying modern NLP and ML techniques to venture capital decision-making
- •Contributed to research at Mila (Quebec AI Institute) on applying AI and climate modeling to visualize personalized climate change outcomes, raising awareness through cutting-edge machine learning techniques
- •Advised UK Government Office for Science on artificial intelligence and technology policy, helping map and taxonomize the modern AI/ML landscape for the Artificial Intelligence Rapid Technology Assessment
- •Guest lectured at ETH Zurich AI Center, London Business School, and University College London on machine learning systems, venture capital, and AI in decision-making
Alpine Kinetics is my effort to bring institutional-grade data systems and decision-support infrastructure to snow science and avalanche forecasting. The same rigor that powers big tech and quantitative finance, applied to help avalanche professionals make better decisions in the mountains.
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