Scott Clark

Scott Clark

I build startups that bring AI research into production at enterprise scale.

Scott Clark is the co-founder and CEO of Distributional, an enterprise AI reliability company backed by a16z and Two Sigma. He was previously co-founder and CEO of SigOpt, a YC-and-a16z-backed Bayesian optimization platform acquired by Intel in 2020, where he then served as VP & GM of AI and HPC supercomputing through 2023. He holds a PhD in applied mathematics and an MS in computer science from Cornell University, where he was a Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellow.

  • Researcher. Published across multiple STEM fields. 1,200+ citations, h-index 16. ~20 granted US patents. PhD Applied Math and MS Computer Science from Cornell University; BS Mathematics, BS Physics, and BS Computational Physics from Oregon State University
  • Founder. Two-time AI-startup founder, backed multiple times by a16z and Two Sigma. SigOpt (YC W15): raised $17M, acquired by Intel in 2020. Distributional: raised $30M, serving multiple Fortune 500 customers.
  • Operator. Built and led teams from 2 to 200. From AI startups as a YC founder to the AI and HPC engineering organization at Intel as VP & GM. Frequent invited speaker at conferences and podcasts.

Experience

  1. 2023 — present
    Distributional Co-founder & CEO
    • Analytics for agents, discovering behavioral signals in AI logs for continuous improvement
    • Built enterprise tooling for AI reliability with statistical testing and adaptive analytics
    • Led a remote team of 30. Raised $30M from a16z, Two Sigma, others over 2 rounds
  2. 2020 — 2023
    Intel VP & GM, AI/HPC Supercomputing
    • Led a team of 200 engineers and technologists worldwide, overseeing a $70M annual budget
    • Responsible for AI and HPC application quality on 35MW+ government datacenters
    • Promoted from Director to Sr. Director to VP, supporting multiple chip and datacenter launches
  3. 2014 — 2020
    SigOpt Co-founder & CEO
    • Bayesian Optimization-as-a-Service product based on my PhD and open source work
    • Led a team of 25; published research at top conferences and closed several million in ARR
    • Acquired by Intel. Raised $17M from a16z, Two Sigma, YC (W15), others over 3 rounds
  4. 2012 — 2014
    Yelp Software Engineer & Team Lead, Ad Targeting
    • Led MOE team (Metric Optimization Engine), 1.3k+ star open source repo based on my PhD
    • Developed novel location-based and bandit-optimized ad targeting algorithms
    • Created the Yelp Dataset Challenge, used by hundreds of thousands of students globally

Education

  1. 2008 — 2012
    Cornell University Ph.D. Applied Mathematics, M.S. Computer Science

    Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellow (full four-year scholarship). Dissertation: "Parallel Machine Learning Algorithms in Bioinformatics and Global Optimization." Advisor: Peter Frazier. Committee: Steve Strogatz, Bart Selman. DOE practicums at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Joint Genome Institute (LBNL).

  2. 2004 — 2008
    Oregon State University B.Sc. Mathematics, B.Sc. Computational Physics, B.Sc. Physics

    Triple bachelor's degrees in four years, magna cum laude. Minors in Actuarial Sciences and Mathematical Sciences. Paradigms in Physics degree track. NSF REU summers at UC Davis (computational biophysics) and the Max Planck Institute Dresden (extreme-value statistics of chaotic quantum systems).