What We Do
Zero to one work is its own discipline. The skills that scale a mature product team are not the skills that get the first version shipped, and the skills that ship a first version are not the skills that hire the first ten people, write the first policy, or assemble the first set of stakeholders. We have done all three across our careers, and we are clear-eyed about the differences.
Our engagements typically begin with a discovery sprint. We work directly with users, scope an MVP we can defend, and ship something usable that is informed by and responsive to what we learn. Then we iterate.
How We Help
We are playbook builders. We are most useful when there is no playbook to follow because the playbook has not been written yet. We will help you write it. We scope deliverables to what is achievable, not just what is ideal, and we treat strategy and delivery as one job, because if you cannot ship the product, the strategy was wrong.
Representative Work
Working Paper is a small firm by design. The work below reflects what you're hiring when you hire us — engagements led at Working Paper, and the senior careers our principals brought with them.
Privacy-safe AI products at scale. We took a privacy tech startup from $0 to multi-million-dollar quarterly revenue, closed an 8-figure Series-B round, and built the integrations and compliance systems that powered ethically consented data acquisition for privacy-safe enrichment.
First-of-its-kind research infrastructure. We co-designed and delivered the first differentially private Facebook dataset, the first Facebook remote-access research tool, and the privacy infrastructure and experimental interventions for the largest consented political science study ever conducted — the U.S. 2020 Election Research Project. We designed, launched, and managed the governance for that same 8-figure study. We also co-designed and launched Medic Labs, with catalytic funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to incubate breakthroughs in precision public health in hard-to-reach communities around the world.
Canonical research on design for complex policy and humanitarian work. Our research distills more than a decade of zero-to-one product practice in global health, drawing on more than seventy digital health initiatives accompanying health workers across sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. It synthesizes how human-centered design actually works when stakes are high, contexts are unfamiliar, and conventional pilot methods fall short. The paper has over 30,000 downloads and hundreds of citations, including in the Annual Reviews of Public Health. It is widely treated as a canonical reference on human-centered design for global health. That methodology grounds how we build new products and programs today.
Net-new organizational capabilities inside large companies. We envisioned, hired, and trained a net new team on research partnerships at a FAANG company from scratch, ranging in seniority from Director to junior IC, to engage academia and drive policy outcomes grounded in scientific discovery. We also scoped, designed, and hired for multiple net-new functions at Seven Bridges — Marketing, European commercial operations, Corporate communications, Recruiting, People operations — while serving on the executive team that scaled the company from $500K to $10M in annual revenue.
AI infrastructure for clients. We design and build AI solutions, like Model Context Protocol servers and the surrounding governance for clients deploying AI agents into sensitive environments. We help organizations expose precisely the data and tools an agent needs without surrendering broader access. We also built first-of-their-kind AI reliability benchmark systems for MLCommons, including the organization's first revenue-generating product, designed to simultaneously support sustainability and the integrity of its benchmarks.
Founding mission-driven companies. We founded Medic, a social enterprise whose digital health platform has been used by more than 170,000 health workers to support over 150 million care encounters, making it the most widely adopted health-worker-facing platform in Africa. We subsequently founded Croft, a venture-backed deep-tech startup making clean energy work for rural communities from Tennessee to Tanzania.