Biography

By Ryan Shea · 2026

In the years leading up to college, I was the top scorer in the entire state for the New Jersey Math League, and I received perfect 800’s on the Math and Chemistry SAT 2’s.

In college, I studied Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University with minors in Computer Science and Robotics, where I was also President of the Princeton Entrepreneurship Club.

During and shortly after college, I worked two healthcare and biotechnology companies: ZocDoc and OmniActive Health Technologies. I also did a short stint shadowing a gastroenterologist.

In mid 2013, I became enamored by the world of bitcoin and cryptocurrency and this led me to co-found Stacks, the top platform for building smart contracts on Bitcoin and a top 100 cryptocurrency with a market cap of several hundred million dollars.

In 2019, I returned to the world of healthcare and biotech. For a few months at a time, I shadowed researchers and contributed programming expertise at the Endy Lab at Stanford, the Church Lab at Harvard, and the Esvelt Lab at MIT.

I spent the next few years doing a combination of investing in startups, launching my second company in the crypto space, and doing my own deep research into the fields of biotech and AI. Throughout these years I invested in over a dozen companies worth over a billion dollars.

In 2025, I worked as a Senior Advisor for Health and Human Services and the Food and Drug Administration. The initial project I worked on was Elsa, an AI chatbot like ChatGPT that is internal to FDA networks and is designed with features that are oriented around FDA workflows. Later in the year, I continued my work at FDA and built a system for Real-Time Clinical Trials, which was announced in April 2026.

This year, I launched two projects that were interesting to me in the world of AI: Autofoundry, a CLI for spinning up GPUs across cloud providers and running AI experiments, and AI IQ, an AI benchmarking site that scores frontier models on a human IQ scale.

Now, I’m working towards starting my next company at the intersection of AI and biotech or joining an awesome company in the space. I am always happy to connect with people who have similar interests to mine. If you’d like to help me hone in on my next endeavor, I’m looking to meet AI researchers interested in biotech as well as biotech researchers interested in AI.