baseball scholarship at the University of Michigan. But the universe had bigger plans for Jeffrey. In a combination of serendipity and chance encounters, Jeffrey met a couple of people who highly recommended he consider an education at Harvard, where his love of math would be better served. He wisely took that advice, and in no time at all he found himself in the hallowed halls of Harvard University. In one class in particular, Jeffrey was in a five-person seminar with another notable Harvard alum, Mark Zuckerberg. It was here
where Jeffrey learned that Mark was busy working on a little website called Facebook. Zuckerberg soon dropped out of school to build the site, whereas Jeff stayed for the long haul. After graduating from Harvard in 2005 he did a stint on Wall Street at Bear Stearns, but left that world after a year to join Mark at Facebook in California. As one of the first 100 employees, Jeffrey became the very first data scientist at Facebook, where he built the data analysis tools that allowed the social network to better understand the behavior of its users. Once the tools he built for Facebook were up and running, the task then switched to making the tools perform better, and it was at this point that Jeffrey parted ways with Mark to pursue his own dreams. As he looked out across the thousands of gifted computer scientists in Silicon Valley, Jeffrey grew disillusioned by how much talent was being squandered. “The best minds of my generation,” Jeffrey once said, “are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.” It was at this moment when he started credit: Albert Chau
As a kid, there was another passion inside Jeffrey’s beautiful mind than math alone. From an early age he would eat, sleep, and breathe baseball. His talent as a baseball player was so impressive it eventually led him to a
courtesy of Rock Health
“With computer science, my parents had the foresight to put me into summer school for coding when I was just eight years old,” Jeffrey, born October 6, 1982, told Charlie Rose in a recent interview. “I was kind of a rambunctious youngster, and I think it was partially to equip me with some skills, but also to get me out of the house and out of their hair for a bit. I found [coding] interesting as a hobby as much as a subject in school. I’ve often found myself calmed when doing math. My mom actually found a letter I wrote when I was in second or third grade where I was describing my favorite thing to do in the world, and in my kid handwriting it reads: “I really love eating and doing math.” Thinking about abstract entities, which are timeless and not part of the temporal realm, has a way of giving you perspective and helps to calm my mind.”
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November 2014 - BELLO