Co-Founding TrueRoll with Joe Walsh PhD is the realization of a lifelong dream to address the inequitable distribution of wealth and access to basic public services for all members of our society (education, transportation, public safety).
I’ve observed the negative impact of regressive government policies first-hand as a member of a disadvantaged community, and have seen through experience, that the right technologies, strong leadership, and smart change management can help our governments level the playing field.
For the past 10 years, I’ve proudly worked with the leaders of our country’s city, state and county governments to address inequality by driving the adoption of progressive initiatives like the 311 call centers and open data portals that have touched the lives of almost every US citizen in some way.
Joe Walsh and I were introduced in 2018 by Tom Schenck Jr, the Chief Data Officer Chicago who had worked with both of us while leading one of the nation’s leading predictive sciences initiatives. Joe and I had taken different paths to arrive at the same spot, wanting to use our individual passions and experience around data and artificial intelligence to improve the world around us.
After meeting with Joe at the University of Chicago’s Data Science for Social Good program we agreed that new developments in the fields of machine learning and data engineering had the potential to change government operations in a way that could affect positive change.
We founded TrueRoll in 2018 to leverage to take a closer look at the country’s wealth distribution problems, and focused in on - taxation, specifically property taxes - the largest source of tax revenue (and geographic/demographic inequality) for most governments.
Since then, we’ve prototyped, partnered, gathered 1000s of datasets, written tens-of-thousands of lines of code, scrapped all of it only to re-write it, raised over $1M in venture capital investment, and hired a team of masters in public policy, computer science, and social sciences to solve some of the country’s biggest problems.
Today we’re building a community of government partners (customers) that are like-minded data do-gooders, engineers, elected officials, and policy makers that are looking to lead the next progressive nationwide initiative: accurate and equitable taxation via more accurate and accessible data and actionable insights.
